Leaf features play an important role in plant species identification and plant taxonomy. The type of the leaf vein is an important morphological feature of the leaf in botany. Leaf vein should be extracted from the leaf in the image before discriminating its type. In this paper a new method of leaf vein extraction has been proposed based on gray-scale morphology. Firstly, the color image of the plant leaf is transformed to the gray image according to the hue and intensity information. Secondly, the gray-scale morphology processing is applied to the image to eliminate the color overlap in the whole leaf vein and the whole background. Thirdly, the linear intensity adjustment is adopted to enlarge the gray value difference between the leaf vein and its background. Fourthly, calculate a threshold with OSTU method to segment the leaf vein from its background. Finally, the leaf vein can be got after some processing on details. Experiments have been conducted with several images. The results show the effectiveness of the method. The idea of the method is also applicable to other linear objects extraction.
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