Machine vision approach for classification of citrus leaves using fused features

The objective of this study was to observe the potential of machine vision (MV) approach for the classification of eight citrus varieties. The leaf images of eight citrus varieties that were grapefruit, Moussami, Malta, Lemon, Kinow, Local lemon, Fuetrells, and Malta Shakri. These were acquired by a digital camera in an open environment without any complex laboratory setup. The acquired digital images dataset was transformed into the multi-feature dataset that was the combination of binary, histogram, texture, spectral, rotational, scalability and translational (RST) invariant features. For each citrus leaf image, total 57 multi-features were acquired on every non-overlapping region of interest (ROI), i.e. (32x32), (64x64), (128x128), and (256x256). Furthermore, the optimized 15 features using the supervised correlation-based feature selection (CFS) technique were acquired. The optimized multi-features dataset to different MV classifiers namely Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forest (RF), J48 and Naïve Bayes using10-fold cross-validation method were plugged-in. The results produced by MLP presented an average overall accuracy of 98.14% on ROIs (256x256) outperforming the other classifiers. The classification accuracy values by MLP on the eight citrus leaf varieties, namely; Grapefruit, Moussami, Malta, Lemon, Kinow, Local lemon, Fuetrells, and Malta Shakri were observed 98%, 98.75%, 99.25%, 97.5%, 97%, 95.87%, 95.5%, and 99.37% respectively.