An interactive aquatic plant encyclopedia at your fingertips

Aquatic plants are very important and essential inhabitants in a small or large scale ecosystem. With the increasing interest in the natural environment and the progress of IT-related technology, there has been a great demand for an aquatic plant information system supporting intuitive user interface and location-free accessibility. In this paper, we present a mobile information bank system that can handle various types of user requirements for aquatic plants including online/offline maintenance of biological and geographic data, content-based image retrieval and Internet-based wired/wireless accessibility, to name a few. We implemented a prototype system for aquatic plants living in Korea. Especially, for more accurate and faster image retrieval, we propose a new image matching scheme based on the enhanced partial dynamic time warping and the distance curve. Through various experiments, we show that our proposed system can satisfy such requirements with good performance.