#Leaf structure cross section series#

Nevertheless, leaves have a great diversity of other internal structures that can potentially store information for discrimination patterns. The use of such approaches has been explored with great success, using both external and some internal aspects of leaves.ДЄmong the computational analysis of leaf internal structures, only color and texture information of photosynthetic and protection tissues have been explored with success to discriminate plant species.

#Leaf structure cross section series#

Nowadays, a series of computational methodologies are available to search and extract information to discriminate plant species, assessing properties such as texture and color, which were not possible to be inferred by conventional analysis. Until recently, information stored on vegetative traits of plants were only extracted by the human eye, which is capable of extracting low amounts of information such as shape, types, divisions, among others. However, some studies have provided good evidence that the analysis of certain external and internal leaf structures could be of substantial information to aid species classification. When assessing vegetative organs as the leaves, there is a chance to confound certain information provided by their morphological and anatomical analysis, as leaves are one of the most diverse plant organs in terms of morphology and anatomy and such morpho-anatomical traits can vary drastically according to environmental conditions. In such cases, specialists also recur and extract information stored in vegetative parts of plants, especially the leaves, which are available for sampling throughout the year. Despite the importance and significance of such aspects, the analysis of such structures cannot be always employed, as these elements appear only in specific times of year, when plants are reproducing or dispersing their descendants. The use of such elements produced both good tools to identify species and important classification systems to understand the evolution of groups of species. The most common aspects used by specialists to categorize and identify species concern the use of external traits of plants, in where such specialists access information stored in the form, ontogeny and number of elements forming reproductive organs (flowers) and dispersion entities (fruits). Yet, in plants, the older and most adopted methodology used to infer and produce classification system is the observation and description of internal and external plant traits, associated, in recent times, with the information stored at molecular level. Since these ancient times, scientists have proposed a series of manners to perform classification and to identify species. The Greek philosopher Theoprasthus performed the most famous case, where he proposed a classification system of plant species according to their external morphology, adopting as a classifier their distinct growth forms. In Biology, such aspects started in the ancient Greece, where philosophers tried to describe, identify and classify natural entities (species) based on identifiable traits. All major areas of scientific knowledge, as geology, physics, biology and medical sciences have been searching for patterns that may help in the understanding of natural phenomena. The results are compared to other imaging methods in the literature and demonstrate that fractal descriptors are precise and reliable in the taxonomic process of plant species identification.ДЄ series of methodologies and approaches have been performed in the task of understanding and description of the natural world surrounding us. A large number of samples are examined, being 606 leaf samples of 50 species from Brazilian flora. Here, the fractal descriptors are used to identify the species of plants based on the image of their leaves. In Biology, such morphology is of great importance because it is related to evolutionary aspects and is successfully employed to characterize and discriminate among different biological structures. In this way, they provide rich information regarding the spatial distribution of the analysed structure and, as a consequence, they measure the multiscale morphology of the object of interest. These descriptors are obtained from the fractal dimension of the object computed at a range of scales. This study proposes to analyse images obtained from cross-sections of leaf midrib using fractal descriptors. Recently, computational methods have been employed to facilitate this task, however, there are few studies front of the wide diversity of plants occurring in the world. The correct identification of plants is a common necessity not only to researchers but also to the lay public.