Complex networks in computer vision, with applications in bioinformatics

Dalcimar Casanova

São Carlos Institute of Physics - University of São Paulo, 2013

Complex networks is a relatively recent field of study, that has called the attention of the scientific community and has been successfully applied in different areas such as computer networking, sociology, medicine, physics, mathematics and others. However the literature shows that there are few works that employ complex networks in feature extraction of images for later analysis or classification. Given an image, it can be modeled as a network, extract topological features and, using these measures, build the classifier desired. This work aims, therefore, investigate this type of application, analyzing new forms of modeling an image as a complex network and investigate some topological features to characterize images. In order to analyze the potential of the techniques developed, we selected a major challenge in the field of computer vision: plant identification by leaf analysis. The plant identification is an important task in many research fields such as biodiversity, ecology, botany, pharmacology and others.

keywords: Complex network, Graphs, Pattern recognition, Plant identification