A Hybrid Approach for Automated Plant Leaf Recognition Using Hybrid Texture Features and Machine Learning-Based Classifiers

Automated plant recognition performs a significant role in various applications used by environmental experts, chemists, and botany experts. Humans can recognize plants manually, but it is a prolonged and low-efficiency process. This paper introduces an automated system for recognizing plant species based on leaf images. A hybrid texture and colour-based feature extraction method was applied on digital leaf images to produce robust feature, and a further classification model was developed. A combination of machine learning methods, such as SVM (support vector machine), KNN (k-nearest neighbours), and ANN (artificial neural network), was applied on dataset for plant classification. This dataset contains 32 types of leaves. The outcomes of this work proved that success rate of plant recognition can be enhanced up to 94% with ANN classifier when both shape and colour features are utilized. Automatic recognition of plants is useful for medicine, foodstuff, and reduction of chemical wastage during crop spraying. It is also useful for identification and preservation of species.