Identification of selected medicinal plant leaves using image features and ANN

Identification of proper medicinal plants is quite challenging and it is the time to protect medicinal plants since several plant species are becoming extinct. Leaves are the key components of a plant. Here we have proposed a method for the extraction of shape, color and texture features from leaf images and training an artificial neural network (ANN) classifier to identify the exact leaf class. The key issue lies in the selection of proper image input features to attain high efficiency with less computational complexity. We tested the accuracy of the network with different combination of image features. The test results on 63 leaf images reveals that this method gives 94.4% accuracy with a minimum of eight input features. This approach is more promising for leaf identification systems that have minimum input and demand less computation time. This work has been implemented using the image processing and neural network toolboxes in MATLAB.