Plant species recognition using spatial correlation between the leaf margin and the leaf salient points

In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for plant species identification, based on the visual information provided by the plant leaves. More precisely, we consider two sources of information: the leaf margin and the leaf salient points. We investigate two shape context based descriptors: the first one describes the leaf boundary while the second descriptor represents the spatial correlation between salient points of the leaf and its margin. We also study the performance of the fusion of these two descriptors on the Image-CLEF 2011 and 2012 leaf datasets. Experiments show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed method.