Hierarchical structure of tree leaf veins
Résumé
Leaf veins make hierarchical networks. According to botanists, the mechanisms of their formation come from the minimization of mechanical constraints. So, the vein network of a given leaf is an important characteristic to know the species of that leaf. We present an automatic algorithm to extract and hierarchize the network of leaf veins in order to use it in various studies, such as comparison between species. The input to our method is a single photograph, taken by a smart-phone in a natural environment. From an initial binary segmentation of veins, we use a thinning algorithm and a recursive labelling method to extract the hierarchical structure, stored in a hierarchical hypergraph.