Enhancement Technique for Leaf Images
N.Valliammal
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science,Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science and HigherEducation for Women, Coimbatore-641 043. INDIAvalli.p.2008@gmail.com
Dr.S.N.Geethalakshmi
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science,Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science and HigherEducation for Women, Coimbatore-641 043. INDIAsngeethalakshmi@yahoo.com
Abstract
—
Computer aided identification of plants is an area of research that has gained more attention in recent years and isproving to be a very important tool in many areas includingagriculture, forestry and pharmacological science. In addition,with the deterioration of environments, many of the rare plantshave died out, and so, the investigation of plant recognition cancontribute to environmental protection. A general process of aComputer Aided Plant Classification through Leaf Recognition(CAP-LR) contains four steps, namely, building the leaf database,preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. This paperfocuses on the preprocessing step of CAP-LR. In this paper, anapproach that simultaneously removes noise, adjusts contrastand enhances boundaries is presented. Experimental resultsprove that the proposed method is an improved version to thetraditional enhancement algorithms.
Keywords: Contrast Adjustment; Discrete Wavelet Transform;Boundary Enhancement; Median filter.
I.
I
NTRODUCTION
Plants are living organisms belonging to thevegetable kingdom that can live on land or in water. They areresponsible for the presence of oxygen [1], which is vital forhuman beings. The ability to know or identify plants allows toassess many important rangeland and pasture variables that arecrucial to proper management of plant life. To help botanistsin this challenging venture, several researches (Man
et al.
,2008; Lee and Chen, 2006) are conducted to automaticallyclassify a given input plant into a category. A general processof a Computer Aided Plant Classification Through Leaf Recognition (CAP-LR) contains four steps [5],[6], namely (i)Acquisition of leaf images and creation of plant and leaf imagedatabase (ii) Preprocessing the acquired images (iii) Extractsalient features and (iv) Cross examine these extracted featureswith the historical data to match the leaf with its associatedplant. The plant that has the maximum match is the recognizedplantOut of these four steps, this paper focuses on thepreprocessing stage of CAP-LR. Preprocessing is thetechnique of enhancing a leaf image in such a way that itincreases the efficiency of the subsequent tasks of the leaf recognition system. Leaf images are normally degraded by thepresence of noise and low or high contrast both in edge areaand image area. Preprocessing an image include removal of noise, edge or boundary enhancement, automatic edgedetection, automatic contrast adjustment and segmentation.For segmentation and classification processes [7, 8] CAP-LRis used. In this paper, an approach that simultaneouslyremoves noise, adjusts contrast and enhances boundaries ispresented.II.
P
ROPOSED
M
ETHODOLOGY
The proposed algorithm presented presents a novelamalgamation of the existing systems to increase the quality of the image. The method combines the use of CLAHE (ContrastLimited Adaptive Histogram Equalization) algorithm forenhancing the contrast of the input leaf image, DiscreteWavelet Transform (DWT) [2] to identify the edge and non-edge region of the image, edge enhancement using sigmoidfunction and noise removal using median filter. The varioussteps involved are shown in Figure 1.
Leaf ImageDiscrete Wavelet TransformationEdge CoefficientDetailed CoefficientContrast Adjustment (CLAHE)Boundary Enhancement(Sigmoid Function)Median FilterDenoisingInverse Discrete Wavelet TransformationEnhanced Leaf image
Figure 1. Enhancement Procedure
The algorithm begins by applying CLAHE to adjustthe contrast of the leaf image. 01CLAHE (Wanga
et al.
, 2004)is a special case of the histogram equalization technique(Gonzalez and Woods, 2007), which seeks to reduce the noiseand edge-shadowing effect produced in homogeneous areas.The algorithm is given in Figure 2. In the experiments, NBwas set to 64, CL was set to 0.01, tile size used was 8 x 8, andthe histogram distribution is Bell-Shaped. The contrastadjusted image is then decomposed using 2D Haar wavelettransform to obtain LL, LH, HL and HH subbands. It is knownthat the LL subband has the average details of the image,while LH contains horizontal edge details, HL has verticaledge details and HH subband elements contain diagonal edgedetails. Thus the detailed coefficients are selected. The edge
(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,Vol. 9, No. 11, November 2011109http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/ISSN 1947-5500
enhancement procedure starts by dividing the waveletcoefficients into 8 x 8 blocks. The image features mean,variance and correlation are calculated for each block to obtainthe local information in terms of texture pattern. Figure 2shows the CLAHE algorithm.
Figure 2. CLAHE Algorithm
Using this information the edges are categorized as strong andweak edges. The weak edges are then enhanced using asigmoid function (Equation 1).
xe1M)x(y
axmx
(1)where M is 255, m = 128 (for 8 bit image), x is the edge pixel,-127
x
+128, parameter ‘a’ refers to the speed of thechange around the center.The next step is to remove the noise from detailedcoefficients. For this purpose, a relaxed median filter is used.Traditional median filter is efficient in noise removal.However, the filter sometimes removes sharp corners and thinlines and destroys structural and spatial neighbourhoodinformation. To solve this, this work uses a relaxed medianfilter (Hamsa
et al.
, 1999). During experimentation, the lowerlimit was set to 3 and upper limit was set to 5 and the windowsize used as 3 x 3. After enhancing the edges and removing thenoise, finally an inverse wavelet transformation is performedto obtain an enhanced leaf image.III.
E
XPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The performance metrics used as Peak Signal toNoise Ratio (PSNR), Pratt’s Figure Of Merit (FOM) andenhancement speed. All the experiments were conducted in aPentium IV machine with 2GB Memory and the proposedenhancement algorithm was developed using MATLAB2009a. The proposed method was evaluated using several testimages, three of which is shown as sample in Figure 3 (Leaf1-Leaf6). The manually corrupted images are also shown inFigure 3 (LeafN1-LeafN6)[3]. Fifty percent contrast wasadded with 10% uniform impulse noise. The results arecompared with the traditional median filter and waveletdenoising filter [9]. To compute PSNR, the block firstcalculates the Mean-Squared Error (MSE) and then the PSNR(Equation 2).PSNR = 10 log10
MSE2R
(2)where MSE =
N*MN,M2)]n,m(
2I)n,m(
1I[
and R(=255) isthe maximum fluctuation in the input image data type, M andN, m and n in MSE equation are number of rows and columnsin the input and output image respectivelyTo compare edge preservation performances of different speckle reduction schemes, the Pratt’s figure of merit(Yu and Acton, 2002) is adopted and is defined by Equation(3).
Nˆ1i2iideal
d11}N,N
ˆmax{1FOM
(3)where
Nˆ
and N
ideal
are the number of detected and ideal edgepixels, respectively, d
i
is the Euclidean distance between the i
th
detected edge pixel and the nearest ideal edge pixel, and
α
is aconstant typically set to 1/9. FOM ranges between 0 and 1,with unity for ideal edge detection.Enhancement time is the execution taken by theproposed algorithm to perform the enhancement operation onthe noisy image and obtain the reconstructed image. The timeis measured in seconds. All the experiments were conducted ina Pentium IV machine with 2GB Memory and the proposedenhancement algorithm was developed using MATLAB2009a. The proposed method was evaluated using several testimage, four of which is shown as sample in Figure 3. Themanually corrupted images are shown in Figure 4. Fiftypercent contrast was added with 10% uniform impulse noise.The results are compared with the traditional median filter andwavelet denoising filter.
Input: Leaf Image, No. of bins (NB),Clip Limit (CL);Output: Contrast Adjusted Image
1.
Divide input image into 'n' number of non-overlapping contextual regions (tile) of equalsizes (8 x 8 used in experiments).2.
For each regiona.
Calculate histogram for each tile using NBb.
Clip the histogram such that its height doesnot exceed CL (Histogram Redistribution)(CL = 0.01 set in experiments).c.
Use transformation function (Equation ---)to create a mapping for this regionCombine neigh-bouring tiles using bilinearinterpolation and modify gray scale valuesaccording to the modified histograms
(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,Vol. 9, No. 11, November 2011110http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/ISSN 1947-5500
The PSNR and Pratt’s Figure of Merit (FOM) valuesobtained are projected in Table 1. Figure 3 shows the originaland corrupted images.
Figure 3. Original and Corrupted ImagesTABLE 1. PSNR
The table 1 & 2 shows the PSNR and FOM value for thedifferent method.
TABLE 2. FOM
The high PSNR obtained gives the understanding thatthe visual quality of the denoised image is good. On averagethe median filter [11] produced an PSNR value of 32 dB,Wavelet produced 35.83dB and 43dB by proposed algorithm.This shows that the proposed method is an improved versionof the traditional algorithms. Similarly, while considering theFOM, by the nearing value to unity achieved by the proposedmodel, it is clear that the proposed model is successful inremoving maximum noise [12] from the corrupted image. Tocompare each filter’s performance with respect to FOMperformance metric, the average value of the six images werecalculated. The median filter based enhancement algorithmshowed 0.38, wavelet showed 0.71 and proposed methodshowed 0.77 FOM. This shows that the proposed algorithmproduces better FOM than all the other models indicating thatthe edge preserving capability is high.
0.000.050.100.150.200.25
T i m e ( S e c o n d s )
LN1 LN2 LN3 LN4 LN5 LN6Median Wavelet Proposed Method
Figure 4. Enhancement Speed
The above figure shows the enhancement speed. Whileconsidering the execution time, the median filter was thequickest in enhancing the corrupted image, which wasfollowed by wavelet. The proposed algorithm was the slowestof all the three algorithms. The reason might be because of theextra computations performed by the CLAHE algorithm.However, this difference is very small (0.05 and 0.01 secondswith median and wavelet filters respectively) and can beconsidered negligible. From the results, it is evident that thespeed of the proposed denoising algorithms is faster and thePSNR value obtained is also high.IV
C
ONCLUSION
Leaf image enhancement is a vital preprocessing stepin CAP-LR system. This paper introduced an automaticcontrast adjustment, edge enhancement and noise removalalgorithm. The algorithm used CLAHE, relaxed median filterand sigmoid function during the enhancement task. Theexperimental results shows that the proposed method showssignificant improvement in terms of noise removed, edgepreservation and speed [11]. In future, the impact of theenhancement algorithm on leaf recognition for plantidentification [4] is to be studied. Further, methods toautomatically calculate the value of NB and CL in CLAHEwill also be considered.
(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,Vol. 9, No. 11, November 2011111http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/ISSN 1947-5500
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Enhancement Technique for Leaf Images
Computer aided identification of plants is an area of research that has gained more attention in recent years and is proving to be a very important tool in many areas including agriculture, forestry and pharmacological science.…
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