Contour analysis for interpretable leaf shape category discovery

Jorge Victorino; Francisco Gómez

doi:10.1186/s13007-019-0497-6

Contour analysis for interpretable leaf shape category discovery

Plant Methods. 2019 Oct 7:15:112. doi: 10.1186/s13007-019-0497-6. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Jorge Victorino^{1

2}, Francisco Gómez³

Affiliations

¹ 1Departament of System Engineering, Universidad Central, Bogotá, 110311 Colombia.
² 2Department of System Engineering, Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, 111311 Colombia.
³ 3Department of Mathematics, Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, 111311 Colombia.

Abstract

Background: The categorical description of leaf shapes is of paramount importance in ecology, taxonomy and paleobotanical studies. Classification systems proposed by domain experts support these descriptions. Despite the importance of these visual descriptive systems, classifications based on this expert's knowledge may be ambiguous or limited when representing shapes in unknown scenarios, as expected for biological exploratory domains. This work proposes a novel strategy to automatically discover the shape categories in a set of unlabeled leaves by only using the leaf-shape information. In particular, we overcome the task of discovering shape categories from different plant species for three different biological settings.

Results: The proposed method may successfully infer the unknown underlying shape categories with an F-score greater than 92%.

Conclusions: The approach also provided high levels of visual interpretability, an essential requirement in the description of biological objects. This method may support morphological analysis of biological objects in exploratory domains.

Keywords: Category discovery; Contour analysis; Interpretability; Leaf shape; Morphological description.