Fast Leaf Vein Extraction Using Hue and Intensity Information

Leaf vein contains significant physiological information of plant. Leaf vein extraction is one of the key steps in plant modeling and plant recognition. Several methods have been presented on leaf vein extraction but all of them are limited in narrow application fields. In this paper a universal method is proposed using hue and intensity information. According to the color difference between leaf vein and mesophyll, leaves are classified as the contrasting color leaf and the concolorous leaf. Leaf vein of the contrasting color leaf can be extracted using only hue information. Leaf vein extraction of the concolorous leaf needs both hue and intensity information. The method has been programmed under Visual C++6.0 and many leaves from different plants have been tested. The results show a good applicability. Compared with other method, new method is simple, fast and universal. It can be embedded in the leaf feature extraction system and work in human-computer interaction way.