Textural features in flower classification

In this work, we investigate the effect of texture features for the classification of flower images. A flower image is segmented by eliminating the background using a threshold-based method. The texture features, namely the color texture moments, gray-level co-occurrence matrix, and Gabor responses, are extracted, and combinations of these three are considered in the classification of flowers. In this work, a probabilistic neural network is used as a classifier. To corroborate the efficacy of the proposed method, an experiment was conducted on our own data set of 35 classes of flowers, each with 50 samples. The data set has different flower species with similar appearance (small inter-class variations) across different classes and varying appearance (large intra-class variations) within a class. Also, the images of flowers are of different pose, with cluttered background under various lighting conditions and climatic conditions. The experiment was conducted for various sizes of the datasets, to study the effect of classification accuracy, and the results show that the combination of multiple features vastly improves the performance, from 35% for the best single feature to 79% for the combination of all features. A qualitative comparative analysis of the proposed method with other well-known existing state of the art flower classification methods is also given in this paper to highlight the superiority of the proposed method. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.