Could k-NN Classifier be Useful in Tree Leaves Recognition?

This paper presents a method for affine invariant recognition of two-dimensional binary objects based on 2D Fourier power spectrum. Such function is translation invariant and their moments of second order enable construction of affine invariant spectrum except of the rotation effect. Harmonic analysis of samples on circular paths generates Fourier coefficients whose absolute values are affine invariant descriptors. Affine invariancy is approximately saved also for large digital binary images as demonstrated in the experimental part. The proposed method is tested on artificial data set first and consequently on a large set of 2D binary digital images of tree leaves. High dimensionality of feature vectors is reduced via the kernel PCA technique with Gaussian kernel and the k-NN classifier is used for image classification. The results are summarized as k-NN classifier sensitivity after dimensionality reduction. The resulting descriptors after dimensionality reduction are able to distinguish real contours of tree leaves with acceptable classification error. The general methodology is directly applicable to any set of large binary images. All calculations were performed in the MATLAB environment