Histogram based segmentation of shadowed leaf images

This paper corresponds to the solution of some problems realized during ragweed identification experiments, namely the samples collected on the field by botanical experts did not match the initial conditions expected. Reflections and shadows appeared on the image, which made the segmentation more difficult, therefore also the classification was not efficient in previous study. In this work, unlike those solutions, which try to remove the shadow by restoring the illumination of image parts, the focus is on separating leaf and background points based on chromatic information, basically by examining the histograms of the full image and the border. This proposed solution filters these noises in the subspaces of hue, saturation and value space and their combination. It also describes a qualitative technique to select the appropriate values from the filtered outputs. With this method, the results of segmentation improved a lot.