Leaf Vein Extraction and Angle Measurement Using Hue Information and Line Detection

Leaf vein features play an important role in botanical studies. It is also a significant and challenging task in the field of computer vision. This paper proposes a new method of leaf vein extraction and angle measurement. The angle is between the primary vein and the secondary vein. We focus on the leaves whose leaf veins are straight. The algorithm's procedure is as follows: first, through contour extraction we segment foreground and background, get clean images of leaves. Second, change the color space from RGB to HSI, separate the hue component and enhance it. Third, get adaptive thresholds for canny detection based on Otsu algorithm. Then using canny edge detection and Hough transform to detect lines, most of them are leaf veins. We need to select the right lines. And finally we can get the angles between the primary vein and the secondary veins through these lines. Experiments have been conducted with a lot of leaf images. Experimental results show that this method can be used to extract leaf veins and measure angles, even when leaf veins are a little blurry.