Short overview of the Chapter-Computer-aided foliage image retrieval systems have the potential to dramatically speed up the process of plant species identification. Despite previous research, this problem remains challenging due to the large intra-class variability and inter-class similarity of leaves. This is particularly true when a large number of species are involved. In this chapter, we present a shape-based approach, the inner-distance shape context, as a robust and reliable solution. We

more »

... show that this approach naturally captures part structures and is appropriate to the shape of leaves. Furthermore, we show that this approach can be easily extended to include texture information arising from the veins of leaves. We also describe a real electronic field guide system that uses our approach. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in experiments on two leaf databases involving more than 100 species and 1000 leaves.