Fast Tree Leaf Image Retrieval Using a Probabilistic Multi-class Support Vector Machine Classifier

Nowadays an increasing number of people own mobile phones with built-in camera, able to take pictures. Thus, having a fast and fully automatic algorithm of image retrieval is considered a promising way to identify plant leaves on a mobile device. Our solution proposes a Support Vector Machine that provides a multi-class probability estimation with radial basis function kernel based on two descriptors: PHOG and a variant of HAAR. With our method we placed seventh among all the fully automatic methods who participated in the ImageCLEF Plant Identification 2012 task. As showed by the results, the proposed method is very fast and at the same time has a classification accuracy comparable with the state of the art in this domain, aspects which make this method feasible in practice.