Separation of occluded leaves using direction field

This paper proposes a method that separates the region of each leaf from an image of occluded leaves and produces a set of single-leaf images as an output. To identify the region of a single leaf, intersection points and direction field are required. An intersection point, which is defined as a concave point between leaves, is used as the starting position of leaf estimation process. Direction field, which describes the average direction of edges in a local area, is used to guide the estimation process. Leaf separation process applies the result of leaf estimation process to create an output. Experimental results show that 71.23% of testing leaf images were correctly separated from each other with a segmentation accuracy of 88.80%.