Identification of ayurvedic medicinal plants by image processing of leaf samples

Identification of the correct medicinal plants that goes in to the preparation of a medicine is very important in ayurvedic medicinal industry. The main features required to identify a medicinal plant is its leaf shape, colour and texture. Colour and texture from both sides of the leaf contain deterministic parameters to identify the species. This paper explores feature vectors from both the front and back side of a green leaf along with morphological features to arrive at a unique optimum combination of features that maximizes the identification rate. A database of medicinal plant leaves is created from scanned images of front and back side of leaves of commonly used ayurvedic medicinal plants. The leaves are classified based on the unique feature combination. Identification rates up to 99% have been obtained when tested over a wide spectrum of classifiers. The above work has been extended to include identification by dry leaves and a combination of feature vectors is obtained, using which, identification rates exceeding 94% have been achieved.