Leaf identification using radial basis function neural networks and SSA based support vector machine

In this research, an efficient scheme to identify leaf types is proposed. In that scheme, the leaf boundary points are fitted in a continuous contour using Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBFNN) to calculate the centroid of the leaf shape. Afterwards, the distances between predetermined points and the centroid were computed and normalized. In addition, the time complexity of the features’ extraction algorithm was calculated. The merit of this scheme is objects’ independence to translation, rotation and scaling. Moreover, different classification techniques were evaluated against the leaf shape features. Those techniques included two of the most commonly used classification methods; RBFNN and SVM that were evaluated and compared with other researches that used complex features extraction algorithms with much higher dimensionality. Furthermore, a third classification method with an optimization technique for the SVM using Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) was utilized showing a significant improvement over RBFNN and SVM.