Towards automatic recognition of plant varieties

In crop variety registration, visual scores of a plant’s appearance are widely and routinely used to establish variety differences. This makes it an ideal candidate for automating through machine vision. This paper describes the outline of a planned system for searching for matches between images from new candidate varieties and those stored in a database of established varieties. Some of the image analysis tools used are described. These include summary statistics derived from 3D histograms of colour components, morphological measures of the shape of leaf tips, principal components of landmark variation and eigenimage scores.