Robust vein extraction on plant leaf images

In this paper an algorithm for robust extraction of leaf veins on plant leaf images is presented and tested on several images. It accomplishes a structure tracking by taking spatial information into account. The final result of the algorithm is a representation of the leaf veins as b-splines which contains the hierarchical information of the vein system. This allows to sample previously estimated affine growth rates along and normal to the plant veins. Thus they can be represented in physiological coordinates. This is vital botanists to compare the results of several leaves and species.