Spectral band selection and testing of edge-subtraction leaf segmentation

Leaf hape is an important feature used in plant identification. The first stepn automating leaf shape analysis in complex, real-world scenes is toegment individual leaves. Leaves are often occluded and overlapped,. and the similar colour and texture characteristics of the leaves. complicate the task of separating them. A segmentation approach based in simple edge detectors operating on narrow-waveband images from an imaging spectrophotometer was developed and tested. Band. selection was done by comparing separability of leaf-leaf, vein, and. leaf-overlap edge regions of multi-plant, images for four species in 115. spectral bands between 400 and 1000 nm. Testing resulted in a mean. segmentation percentage of 64% using a Sobel edge detector operating on an image in a 5 nm wide waveband centred at 719 nm. This result compared favourably with existing research given the relative. simplicity of the segmentation algorithm and complexity of the test. images used.