Recognizing plants using stochastic L-systems

Recognizing naturally occurring objects has been a difficult task in computer vision. One of the keys to recognizing objects is the development of a suitable model. One type of model, the fractal, has been used successfully to model complex natural objects. A class of fractals, the L-system, has not only been used to model natural plants, but has also aided in their recognition. This research extends the work in plant recognition using L-systems in two ways. Stochastic L-systems are used to model and generate more realistic plants. Furthermore, to handle the complexity of recognition, a learning system is used that automatically generates a decision tree for classification. Results indicate that the approach used here has great potential as a method for recognition of natural objects.