Plant Species Identification Based on Plant Leaf using Machine Learning Techniques

In the absence of plants, we would not be able to live on this planet. A growing number of plant species are available, and they number in the hundreds. Foresters, farmers, environmentalists, and educators need knowledge of species to make informed decisions. As a result, species identification belongs to an interdisciplinary field of study. It may be challenging and tedious for nonexperts who are not familiar with typical botanical terms. In the fields of computer vision and machine learning, advances in this area can make this task easier. Although some efforts have been made, all plant species cannot be identified with one system. In this study, a similar approach was taken. In order to identify a plant, four steps have to be completed: acquisition of images, pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification. For this study, 1,125 images of 15 different species of leaves were used from the Swedish leaf dataset. Pre-processing is performed using Gaussian filtering mechanisms, and then texture and colour features are extracted.