Leafsnap: A Computer Vision System for Automatic Plant Species Identification

We describe the first mobile app for identifying plant species using automatic visual recognition. The system – called Leafsnap – identifies tree species from photographs of their leaves. Key to this system are computer vision components for discarding non-leaf images, segmenting the leaf from an untextured background, extracting features representing the curvature of the leaf’s contour over multiple scales, and identifying the species from a dataset of the 184 trees in the Northeastern United States. Our system obtains state-of-the-art performance on the real-world images from the new Leafsnap Dataset – the largest of its kind. Throughout the paper, we document many of the practical steps needed to produce a computer vision system such as ours, which currently has nearly a million users.