Recognition of plants using a stochastic L-system model

Recognition of natural shapes like leaves, plants, and trees, has proven to be a challenging problem in computer vision. The members of a class of natural objects are not identical to each other. They are similar, have similar features, but are not exactly the same. Most existing techniques have not succeeded in effectively recognizing these objects. One of the main reasons is that the mod- els used to represent them are inadequate themselves. In this re- search we use a fractal model, which has been very effective in modeling natural shapes, to represent and then guide the recogni- tion of a class of natural objects, namely plants. Variation in plants is accommodated by using the stochastic L-systems. A learning sys- tem is then used to generate a decision tree that can be used for classification. Results show that the approach is successful for a large class of synthetic plants and provides the basis for further research into recognition of natural plants. © 2002 SPIE and IS&T.