Recognition of partially occluded plant leaves using a modified watershed algorithm

Occlusion is an obstacle to two-dimensional machine vision recognition of plants in natural outdoor scenes. Five modifications to the Watershed algorithm were investigated for separating occluded plant leaves, in an attempt to reduce the excessive object fragmentation associated with the original Watershed algorithm. The best modified algorithm improved the recognition of occluded tomato cotyledons and tomato true leaves improved by a factor of 3 and 2, respectively, after it was applied to occluded plant leaves in natural outdoor scenes. Two of the modified Watershed algorithms required about 11% less computation time than the original.