**Yaonan Zhang 1,2, Jing Cui 3, Zhaobin Wang 1,2,3,\*, Jianfang Kang 1,2 and Yufang Min 1,2**


Received: 3 June 2020; Accepted: 24 July 2020; Published: 28 July 2020

**Abstract:** Plants are ubiquitous in human life. Recognizing an unknown plant by its leaf image quickly is a very interesting and challenging research. With the development of image processing and pattern recognition, plant recognition based on image processing has become possible. Bag of features (BOF) is one of the most powerful models for classification, which has been used for many projects and studies. Dual-output pulse-coupled neural network (DPCNN) has shown a good ability for texture features in image processing such as image segmentation. In this paper, a method based on BOF and DPCNN (BOF\_DP) is proposed for leaf classification. BOF\_DP achieved satisfactory results in many leaf image datasets. As it is hard to get a satisfactory effect on the large dataset by a single feature, a method (BOF\_SC) improved from bag of contour fragments is used for shape feature extraction. BOF\_DP and LDA (linear discriminant analysis) algorithms are, respectively, employed for textual feature extraction and reducing the feature dimensionality. Finally, both features are used for classification by a linear support vector machine (SVM), and the proposed method obtained higher accuracy on several typical leaf datasets than existing methods.

**Keywords:** feature extraction; shape context; plant recognition; DPCNN; BOF
