Multiscale recognition of legume varieties based on leaf venation images

•We develop an automatic low cost procedure to classify legume varieties.•The method is based on multiscale feature analysis of leaf venation images.•We use modern automatic classifiers and feature selection techniques.•We improve previous results in the recent literature.•The proposed method outperforms human expert classification. In this work we propose an automatic low cost procedure aimed at classifying legume species and varieties based exclusively on the characterization and analysis of the leaf venation network. The identification of leaf venation patterns which are characteristic for each species or variety is not an easy task since in some situations (specially for cultivars from the same species) the vein differences are visually indistinguishable for humans. The proposed procedure takes as input leaf images acquired using a standard scanner, processes the images in order to segment the veins at different scales, and measures different traits on them. We use these features in combination with modern automatic classifiers and feature selection techniques in order to perform recognition. The process was initially applied to recognize three different legumes in order to evaluate the improvements over previous works in the literature, and then it was employed to distinguish three diverse soybean cultivars. The results show the improvements achieved by the usage of the multiscale features. The cultivar recognition is a more challenging problem, since the experts cannot distinguish evident differences in plain sight. However, we achieve acceptable classification results. We also analyze the feature relevance and identify, for each classifier, a small set of distinctive traits to differentiate the species and varieties.