Identification of vegetal species by analysis of microscope images of leaves

Jarbas Joaci de Mesquita Sá Junior

Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação - Universidade de São Paulo, 2008

Currently, taxonomy demands a great effort from the botanists, ranging from the process of acquisition of the sample to the comparison with the species already classified in the herbarium. For this reason, the TreeVis is a project created to identify vegetal species using leaf attributes. This work is a part of the TreeVis project and aims at identifying vegetal species by analysing cross-sections of leaves amplified by a microscope. Signatures were extract from cuticle, adaxial epiderm, palisade parenchyma and sponge parenchyma. Each signature was analysed by a neural network with the leave-one-out method to verify its ability to identify species. Once the most important feature vectors were selected, two different approachs were adopted. The first was a simple concatenation of the selected feature vectors. The second, and more elaborated approach, consisted of reducing the dimensionality (three attributes only) of some component signatures before the feature vector concatenation. The final vectors obtained by these two approaches were tested by a neural network with leave-one-out to measure the correctness rate reached by the synergism of the signatures of different leaf regions. The experiments resulted in the identification of eight different species and the identification of the Gochnatia polymorpha species in Cerradão and Gallery Forest environments, Wet and Dry seasons, and under Sun and Shadow constraints

keywords: Adaxial epiderm,Bhattacharyya and Jeffrey-Matusita distance,Cuticle,Feature extraction,Neural networks,Palisade parenchyma,PCA,Sponge parenchyma,Taxonomy