Modified locally linear discriminant embedding for plant leaf recognition

Based on locally linear embedding (LLE) and modified maximizing margin criterion (MMMC), a modified locally linear discriminant embedding (MLLDE) algorithm is proposed for plant leaf recognition in this paper. By MLLDE, the plant leaf images are mapped into a leaf subspace for analysis, which can detect the essential leaf manifold structure. Furthermore, the unwanted variations resulting from changes in period, location, and illumination can be eliminated or reduced. Different from principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), which can only deal with flat Euclidean structures of plant leaf space, MLLDE not only inherits the advantages of locally linear embedding (LLE), but makes full use of class information to improve discriminant power by introducing translation and rescaling models. The experimental results on real plant leaf database show that the MLLDE is effective for plant leaf recognition.