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Leaf area measurement of selected vegetable seedlings using elliptical Hough

transform

Article  in  Transactions of the ASAE. American Society of Agricultural Engineers · September 2002

DOI: 10.13031/2013.11052

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 LEAF AREA MEASUREMENT OF SELECTED VEGETABLE
SEEDLINGS USING ELLIPTICAL HOUGH TRANSFORM
C.–F. Chien, T.–T. Lin

ABSTRACT. An image–processing algorithm using the elliptical Hough transform was developed to determine position,
orientation, and leaf area of seedling leaves from top–view images. The algorithm significantly reduced the computational
effort and memory requirement and was capable of identifying partly occluded leaves. Four varieties of vegetable seedlings,
namely cabbage, Chinese mustard, edible amaranth (A. mangostanus Linn.), and edible amaranth (A. inamoenus Willd.),
at various growth stages were used to test the efficacy of the measurement algorithm. For measurements of individual leaf
area, the relative estimation errors were 8.2 µ9.3%, 14.4 µ11.7%, 27.5 µ14.4%, and 16.0 µ11.0%, respectively. For
measurements of total leaf area, the relative estimation errors were 16.0 µ6.4%, 17.0 µ9.8%, 24.9 µ8.1%, and 18.4 µ9.4%
in corresponding order. The sources of error were mainly due to tilting leaves and unsuccessful identification of small or
severely occluded leaves of the seedling.
Keywords. Image processing, Leaf area, Hough transform, Feature extraction.

P
lant growth measurement and analysis are useful in
describing and interpreting the performance of
whole–plant systems grown under various
conditions. Among many useful indicators of plant
growth, leaf area is perhaps the most important parameter
influencing photosynthesis, evapotranspiration, transpira–
tion, and productivity; thus, its measurement is of great
importance. Traditional methods for leaf area measurement
includes correlation of leaf area with weighing, square
counting, and mechanical and photoelectric planimetry.
Marshall (1968) comprehensively reviewed the numerous
methods for leaf area measurement. Direct leaf area
measurement methods are generally simple and reliable but
usually tedious and destructive. Many innovative and
efficient methods have recently been introduced. These
methods, including hemispheric photographs and gap
fraction analysis, have been applied successfully to forest and
agricultural canopies. Sommer and Lang (1994) used two
commercially available instruments to measure indirectly
the leaf area index of spur and minimal pruned vines. Both
instruments were developed from the principles of gap
fraction theory (Lang et al., 1985), which recovers
geometrical information about foliage from gap fractions by
measuring the transmission of light through the leaf canopy
at a range of angles. Brenner et al. (1995) used three
commercially available instruments to measure leaf areas of
individual Retama sphaerocarpa bushes. Their experimental
Article was submitted for review in October 2001; approved for
publication by the Information & Electrical Technologies Division of
ASAE in May 2002.
The authors are Chung–Fang Chien, Graduate Student, and Ta–Te
Lin, ASAE Member Engineer, Professor, Department of Bio–Industrial
Mechatronics Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Corresponding author: Ta–Te Lin, Department of Bio–Industrial
Mechatronics Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Roosevelt
Road, Sec. 4, Taipei, Taiwan 106, R.O.C.; phone: 886–2–23929416; fax:
886–2–23929416; e–mail: m456@ccms.ntu.edu.tw.
results showed that the leaf areas estimated by the three
instruments were not significantly different from the directly
measured total leaf area.
The advent of computer–based image–processing sys-
tems has further boosted the applications of machine vision
techniques for assessment of plant characteristics (Trooien
and Heermann, 1992; Howarth and Stanwood, 1993; Nyak-
wende et al., 1997). Meyer and Davison (1987) demonstrated
that both a single–camera and a dual–camera video imaging
system worked well for determining insitu leaf area, stem
diameter, and petiole angle of soybeans. The single–camera
system proved useful in measuring canopy closure from
overhead images. Storlie et al. (1989) also applied image–
processing techniques to growth analysis of corn and soybean
plants. The total plant leaf area and wet and dry plant weight
were determined by correlating the profile images of the
plant.
Analysis of leaf morphology also holds interests of
botanists because it relates to plant identification and
developmental studies in many research areas. Identification
of plants plays an important role in developing automatic
machineries for pest, disease, and weed control with machine
vision (Yonekawa et al., 1996). A common source of
information used to identify plants is leaf shape. Leaf shape
has been used extensively to identify various agronomically
important plants and agricultural products (Woebbecke et al.,
1995; Guyer et al., 1986; Yonekawa et al., 1996). One of the
prerequisites for leaf shape analysis using image processing
is to locate the leaf boundaries of a plant. This can be
achieved by image segmentation and image–processing
algorithms, such as edge detection or blob analysis. However,
when leaves are partially occluded by adjacent leaves, the
difficulty in locating and segmenting leaves in an image
increases. Franz et al. (1991a, 1991b, 1995) developed a
method for identifying several kinds of seedlings according
to their leaf shape as described by a curvature function. They
did not succeed in identifying single boundaries of regions of
multiple leaves when using the Fourier–Mellin correlation

Transactions of the ASAE

Vol. 45(5): 1669–1677 E 2002 American Society of Agricultural Engineers ISSN 0001–2351 1669
technique for the first time. But if the occluded segment of the
boundary was short and had small curvature, then replacing
the occluded portion with a line segment did not alter
significantly the curvature function. Using this algorithm,
they successfully segmented 91.2%, 87.5%, 95.8%, and
71.4% of the leaves in images of velvetleaf, soybean, ivyleaf
morning glory, and foxtail seedlings, respectively. Their
research revealed that it is possible to reconstruct an object
from its incomplete contour to a complete contour if we have
a priori information about that object.
The problem of locating partially occluded objects in an
image can also be circumvented by using the Hough
transform (Ballard, 1981). Whittaker et al. (1987) used the
circular Hough transform to locate tomatoes in images
acquired under natural field conditions. They concluded that
the circular Hough transform is valid for situations in which
the perimeter of the tomato is partially occluded. Chien and
Lin (2000a, 2000b) used the elliptical Hough transform to
search for ellipses that matched the boundary of occluded
leaves dissected from seedling cabbage, Chinese mustard,
and broccoli. They also examined the performance of the
image–processing algorithm by altering the overlapping
ratio and the orientation of occluded leaves. The results
showed that when the overlapping ratios were below 40% in
the lateral direction or 60% in the axial direction, individual
leaves could be located successfully.
The purpose of this study was to extend our previous
research on identifying occluded leaves using the elliptical
Hough transform and to develop a fully automatic image–
processing algorithm for measuring leaf area and counting
leaf number of selected vegetable seedlings. The algorithm
should meet the requirement to identify directly leaves from
seedling plant under the assumptions that leaves are approxi-
mately planar and close to elliptical in shape.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
MATERIALS
Many leaf shapes are approximately elliptical when
observed from above. Shapes such as oblong, linear–oblong,
elliptical, orbicular, obovate, ovate, and oval can be de-
scribed approximately by an ellipse. Therefore, it is reason-
able to find an ellipse that matches the corresponding leaf
boundary of these categories of leaf shape. However, leaves
are often covered by other leaves in a seedling plant,
especially for seedlings of later growth stages. As the amount
of occlusion increases, the task of identifying leaves becomes
more challenging. To investigate the occlusion effect, we
used selected vegetables of various growth stages to test the
image–processing algorithm. Four kinds of vegetable seed-
lings, namely cabbage (Hybrid), Chinese mustard (Tokyo
Bekana), and two species of edible amaranth (A. mangosta-
nus Linn. and A. inamoenus Willd.) were tested in the
experiments. The seedlings were cultured under a
20³C/15³C (day/night temperature) environment in the
phytotron of National Taiwan University. A total of 74 seed-
lings were sampled randomly at different times for image
acquisition and measurement until about 30 days after
emerging. The top–view images of seedlings were obtained
for image analysis, and leaves were dissected from each
seedling subsequently for area measurement using a separate
image–processing program. To measure individual leaf area,
1670
the dissected leaves were separately placed on a backlit
flatbed and covered with a transparent glass plate to obtain
high–contrast images of leaves clearly silhouetted against the
background. The real dimension of leaf area was calibrated
initially with a 10 Ü 10 cm2 square template. Using filter
paper of known area (9 cm diameter) to test the accuracy of
this measurement system, as described by Beverly and van
Iersel (1998), the error was within 1.5%.
IMAGE ACQUISITION AND PRE–PROCESSING
The image–processing system worked on a Pentium III
computer equipped with a color image processing board
(Meteor, Matrox, Inc., Dorval, Canada). Seedling images
were taken using a CCD camera (WAT–202B, Watec Co.,
Ltd., Tsuruoka, Japan) and a 12.5 to 75.0 mm zoom lens.
Top–view seedling images were acquired under normal
fluorescent lighting and digitized into 24–bit RGB images
with a resolution of 512 Ü 480 pixels. The image–processing
program was developed using Borland C++ Builder under the
Microsoft Windows operating system. The basic image–
processing functions in the program, such as image acquisi-
tion and display, was supported by the MIL
image–processing library (Matrox, Inc., Dorval, Canada). To
measure the leaf area of individual leaves dissected from
seedlings, a separate program applying blob analysis was
developed. The dimensions of pixels in an image were
calibrated initially, and the leaf area was obtained by
converting the pixel number of the segmented leaf into real
dimensions. These leaf area data were later compared with
the leaf area data obtained using the elliptical Hough
transform algorithm.
Following image acquisition, the seedling top–view
image was first converted from color to gray scale. The
seedling was then extracted from the background using the
unsupervised segmentation method, as proposed by Otsu
(1979). Otsu’s method utilizes the shape information of the
image histogram to select automatically a threshold value for
image segmentation. To extract the boundary of the seedling,
edge detection and thinning procedures were then applied.
There are many types of edge–detecting operators. In this
study, we used Kirsch gradient masks for edge detection
(Haralick and Shapiro, 1993). Since the detected edge may
be more than one pixel thick, a thinning operation using the
Yokoi connectivity number was further performed to locate
the seedling boundary (Yokoi et al., 1975). The positions of
the seedling boundary pixels, represented by their x and y
coordinates, were then fed into the elliptical Hough trans-
form algorithm to find the ellipses corresponding to the
boundaries of seedling leaves.
ELLIPTICAL HOUGH TRANSFORM
The Hough transform was originally a method of locating
underlying lines in a digital image by identifying collinear
points mathematically. Every candidate pixel in an image is
transformed into another parameter space. The parameter
space is defined by the parametric representation used to
describe lines in the image plane (Hough, 1962). Duda and
Hart (1972) modified the Hough transform by proposing the
use of different set of parameters to describe a straight line.
They also suggest that the Hough transform could be
extended to arbitrary shapes. Ballard (1981) further demon-
strated that the Hough transform could be generalized to
detect not only analytic curves such as lines, circles, and
TRANSACTIONS OF THE ASAE
parabolas, but also arbitrarily complex shapes. With the
elliptical Hough transform, the equation of the ellipse can be Leaf image after edge detection
expressed as: and thinning.

x2 y2
+ =1 (1)
a2 b2
where x and y represent Cartesian coordinates of any point on Reduce image resolution from
the ellipse, and a and b are the major and minor axes of the 512 × 512 to 32 × 32 pixels
ellipse, respectively. Equation 1 can be expressed in polar
coordinates by substituting x = r@cosq and y = r@sinq. After
rearranging, it becomes:
Search for candidate ellipses
a2b2
r= (2) and sort the list.
b2 cos2 θ + a2 sin2 θ
where r denotes the distance between the point on the ellipse
and the center point of the ellipse, and q is the angle between
the x–axis and the line connecting the two points.
Equation 2 is an extension of the standard parametric Recalculate the possibility of Delete duplicated points in the less
Hough transform to ellipses. It is clear that the elliptical candidate ellipses. possible ellipses.
Hough transform imposes the requirement of a five–dimen-
sional parameter space (Muammar and Nixon, 1991). That is
to say, the transformation requires intensive computation. To
reduce the computational complexity, one can use the
method of image pyramids to reduce image resolution Choose the ellipses with threshold
Increase image resolution
(Richards and Jia, 1999). This method need not search every from X× Y to 2X× 2Y pixels.
value of the accumulated occurrence
pixel of an image. It is possible to localize edges quickly by and sort the list.
finding apparent edges (regions) in the upper levels of image
pyramids. The succeeding lower pixel groupings are then
searched to localize edges better by the increasing image
resolution. To further reduce the computational complexity No
and memory requirement of the elliptical Hough transform, Reach the
a new algorithm was implemented in this research. The final resolution?
algorithm consists of three steps: (1) reducing image
resolution, (2) exhaustive search for ellipses, and (3)
Yes
increasing iteratively image resolution for more precise
ellipses. A flowchart of the 3–step algorithm is shown in
Obtain the final
figure 1.
list of ellipses.

Step 1: Reducing Image Resolution

Following the procedure of leaf boundary detection, the
512 Ü 512 image was saved and a series of lower resolution
images was generated from the original resolution image.
The image with the lowest resolution was 32 Ü 32 pixels. The
elliptical Hough transform started with the 32 Ü 32 image,
and all the boundary pixels were transformed into the
five–dimensional parameter space.
Step 2: Exhaustive Search for Ellipses
With the low–resolution image, the transformation was
carried out by searching exhaustively for all possible ellipses
that cross the boundary point. The detailed algorithm of the
exhaustive search for ellipses was described elsewhere
(Chien and Lin, 2000b). The occurrence of possible ellipses
was accumulated in a five–dimensional array. The candidate
ellipses were determined by the accumulation of their shape
edge occurrences. All candidates were queued into an array
and sorted according to their edge occurrences. A threshold
value of the accumulated occurrences was set to select
possible ellipses corresponding to the boundaries of leaves.
Figure 1. Flowchart of the elliptical Hough transform used to search for
ellipses in an image.
Step 3: Increasing Iteratively Image Resolution for More
Precise Ellipses
The previous step obtained a sorted array representing
candidate ellipses that possibly matched the boundaries of
leaves. We then increased the resolution of the image step by
step until the search result was satisfactory. Increasing the
image resolution also increased the uncertainty of the
positions and dimensions of the ellipses. To get the most
appropriate candidate ellipse, more candidate ellipses were
searched in the neighborhood of the temporarily searched
ellipses. This step can be considered as adjusting the
temporarily searched ellipses to a more precise position and
dimension. In this research, search results converged at an
image resolution of 128 Ü 128 pixels. Further increase in
image resolution did not enhance the search result because
real leaf boundaries are not as smooth as an ellipse. The
image with 512 Ü 512 resolution provided too detailed
information for identifying a leaf as an ellipse. Therefore, the
iterative search step ended at a resolution of 128 Ü 128
pixels.

Vol. 45(5): 1669–1677 1671

 With this 3–step approach, we were able to use the
elliptical Hough transform to search for ellipses quickly. For
the detection of leaves in vegetable seedlings, sometimes the
identification of all seedling leaves was not easy, especially
for seedlings of later growth stage (5 to 6 leaves) when the
effect of leaf occlusion became significant. To deal with this
situation, we developed a search process comprising two
stages. The first stage is to find the ellipses representing the
boundaries of leaves with the 3–step approach. However, the
threshold value of the accumulated occurrence was set at a
high value to ensure that the searched ellipses actually
correspond to the boundaries of leaves. Then the boundary
pixels corresponding to the searched ellipses were erased
from the image. In the second stage, we again searched the
remaining pixels with a lower threshold value for the other
ellipses. This modified algorithm for detecting leaves of a
seedling plant is shown in figure 2. With this strategy, the
more outstanding ellipses were picked out in the first stage,
and the boundary pixels were removed to simplify the search
in the second stage.
Figure 3 illustrates the steps of the elliptical Hough
transform in searching for cabbage seedling leaves. Besides
the number of leaves, the position, orientation, and size of the
leaves can be estimated using the searched ellipses. Figure 4
shows typical examples of the search results for four different
vegetable seedlings: cabbage, Chinese mustard, and edible
Set a high threshold value of
the accumulated occurrence.
Use 3–step elliptical Hough
transform to search ellipses
(Figure 1).
Set a lower threshold value Find the real leaf boundary
of the accumulated from the corresponding
occurrence. ellipse.
Erase boundary pixels
corresponding to the searched
ellipses.
No
Second pass?
Yes
Combine the searched results
of the two passes
Output the final results
Figure 2. Flowchart of the 2–pass elliptical Hough transform algorithm
for detecting leaves of a seedling plant.
1672
amaranth (A. mangostanus Linn. and A. inamoenus Willd.).
While a 5–parameter elliptical Hough transform was com-
putationally intensive, the 3–step algorithm considerably
reduced the computational effort and memory requirement.
Table 1 shows the efficacy of the 3–step algorithm by
comparing the processing time with the brute–force search
algorithm using a 500–MHz Pentium III computer. The time
required to process a 128 Ü 128 top–view image of a typical
five–leaf seedling using the 3–step algorithm was about
16 seconds. It is obvious that the computing time increased
as image resolution increased. The computational advantage,
defined as the ratio of computing time between the brute–
force search algorithm and the 3–step algorithm, was even
manifest for images with higher resolution. In fact, for the
brute–force search algorithm, the growth of computing time
approximates N5 (for an N Ü N image). Therefore, it is far
from practical for higher resolutions, such as a 256 Ü 256
image. The significant reduction of computational load using
the 3–step algorithm makes the 5–dimensional elliptical
Hough transform executable in most practical applications.
LOCATING REAL LEAF BOUNDARY
Ellipses representing seedling leaf boundaries were
obtained following the 2–pass elliptical Hough transform.
These ellipses only tell us rough information about the
seedling leaves. To estimate better the characteristics of
seedling leaves, we need to take into account the actual leaf
boundary from the image (Loncaric, 1998). Boundary scalar
transform algorithms consist of two major steps. In the first
step, a one–dimensional function is constructed from the
two–dimensional shape boundary. The constructed one–di-
mensional function is used in the second step to describe the
shape of the two–dimensional boundary. In this research, if
all the leaf boundaries are visible, then it is easy to restore all
the boundaries based on the boundary scalar transform
algorithm. The boundary can be easily searched from the
interior of the ellipse to the exterior of the ellipse with some
offset. To accomplish this, we represented the ellipse and the
real leaf boundary in polar coordinates, r(q). The origin of the
leaf (centroid) was set at the center of the two loci of the
corresponding ellipse. The polar angle was defined as 0³ in
the direction of the leaf stem. The search of the boundary
point was performed by looking for the pixel that is closest
to a point on the ellipse at a specific polar angle (q). The
search was completed when the polar angle scanned from 0³
to 360³ with an interval of 1³. When the leaf boundary was
occluded by another leaf, search of the leaf boundary was not
possible. To resolve this problem, we replaced it with the
corresponding point on the ellipse as a means to restore the
missing leaf boundary.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
LOCATING SEEDLING LEAVES
The first step to estimate seedling leaf area was to identify
individual leaves of a seedling plant. The efficacy of the
elliptical Hough transform was first examined by analyzing
the accuracy of locating leaves from seedling top–view
images. Due to different degrees of leaf occlusion, it is
reasonable to expect that existing leaves could be missed or
non–existing leaves could be mistakenly identified in the
search process. Table 2 shows the results of the experiment
TRANSACTIONS OF THE ASAE
 (A) (B) (C)

(D) (E) (F)

(G) (H) (I)

Figure 3. Steps in using the elliptical Hough transform to search for leaves of a cabbage seedling: (A) segmented image, (B) 512Ü512 image after edge
detection and thinning, (C) image with 32 Ü 32 resolution, (D) searched ellipses for the first pass (128Ü128 resolution), (E) searched ellipses for the
second pass (128 Ü 128 resolution), (F) combined results, (G) searched leaves shape for the first pass (predicted boundary is in dotted lines), (H) searched
leaves shape for the second pass (predicted boundary is in dotted lines), and (I) all searched leaves (predicted boundary is in dotted lines).

to locate leaves in images for four different varieties of
vegetable seedlings. The type I error in the table denotes the
error rate of seedling leaves that were not detected success-
fully, whereas the type II error denotes the error rate of
non–existing leaves that were falsely identified. The type I
errors for the four vegetable seedlings ranged from 8.70% to
10.94%. The type II errors were approximately 8% except for
the case of Chinese mustard, which was 17.54%. The source
of error was mainly due to occlusion of leaves, especially for
seedlings of later growth stage (Chien and Lin, 2000b). Small
leaves in a seedling also tended to be ignored by the search
algorithm due to relatively fewer boundary pixels that were
used for the determination of the candidate ellipse. However,
this source of error did not affect significantly the estimation
of seedling total leaf area.
ESTIMATION OF INDIVIDUAL LEAF AREA
The elliptical Hough transform algorithm developed in
this research was useful not only in locating the position and
orientation of leaves but also in estimating leaf area and leaf
number of a seedling plant. We first examined the perfor-
mance of the algorithm by comparing the leaf area estimation
of individual leaves. Later we analyzed the results of total
leaf area estimation. Comparisons were made between the
non–destructive leaf area estimation from the top–view
image and the leaf area measurement of the dissected leaves
from the same seedling.
Figure 5 shows the experimental results of leaf area
estimation using the algorithm developed in this research.
Leaf areas of individual seedling leaves were estimated from
the top–view images after the leaf positions were located
using the elliptical Hough transform. The estimated values
were compared with their corresponding actual leaf area as

Vol. 45(5): 1669–1677 1673


(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
Figure 4. Typical examples of searched results from different vegetables
seedlings: (A) cabbage, (B) Chinese mustard, (C) edible amaranth (A.
mangostanus Linn.), and (D) edible amaranth (A. inamoenus Willd.).
determined from images of dissected leaves. Experimental
results revealed that the values of the estimated leaf area tend
to be smaller than those of the actual leaf area. This is
especially true for the case of edible amaranths (A. mangosta-
nus Linn. and A. inamoenus Willd.). The regression equa-
tions and the coefficients of determination for the estimated
and actual leaf area were determined and are listed in
equations 3 to 6 for seedlings of cabbage, Chinese mustard,
edible amaranth (A. mangostanus Linn.), and edible ama-
ranth (A. inamoenus Willd.), respectively:
1674
A = 0.947@Ae + 0.256 (R2 = 0.94) (3)
A = 1.026@Ae – 0.986 (R2 = 0.91) (4)
A = 0.782@Ae – 0.319 (R2 = 0.91) (5)
A = 0.810@Ae + 0.607 (R2 = 0.96) (6)
where A (cm2) is the actual leaf area, and Ae (cm2) is the
estimated leaf area. The coefficients of determination (R2)
were all higher than 0.9, indicating good linearity. The
average absolute errors of estimation with their standard
deviations were 0.70 µ0.62, 1.35 µ1.35, 2.54 µ1.88, and
3.20 µ3.44 cm2 for cabbage, Chinese mustard, and the two
amaranths, respectively. Using the actual leaf area as the
denominator, the relative estimation errors were 8.2 µ9.3%,
14.4 µ11.7%, 27.5 µ14.4%, and 16.0 µ11.0%. Since the leaf
areas were estimated from the seedling top–view images, it
is obvious that the estimation error was inevitable when
seedling leaves were not in a horizontal plane. However,
experimental results showed that when leaves were not
severely in oblique or tilt orientation, the estimation of leaf
area was reasonably accurate but showed a tendency to
underestimate actual leaf area. The underestimation of leaf
area was more apparent for the edible amaranths because of
the greater degree of tilting and oblique orientation of
seedling leaves.
ESTIMATION OF TOTAL LEAF AREA
The total leaf area of a seedling is the sum of the areas of
all individual leaves of the entire seedling plant. It is often
needed as an index of growth and for assimilation and
transpiration determinations in plant physiological re-
searches. Once the leaf area of individual leaves is deter-
mined, estimation of the total leaf area is straightforward.
Figure 6 shows the comparisons of estimated total leaf area
versus actual total leaf area for four different vegetable
seedlings. The regression equations and the coefficients of
determination for the estimated and actual total leaf areas are
listed in equations 7 to 9 for seedlings of cabbage, Chinese
mustard, edible amaranth (A. mangostanusLinn.), and edible
amaranth (A. inamoenusWilld.), respectively:
AT = 0.758@ATe + 2.075 (R2 = 0.87) (7)
AT = 0.956@ATe – 5.387 (R2 = 0.88) (8)
AT = 0.660@ATe + 3.150 (R2 = 0.91) (9)
AT = 0.869@ATe – 2.019 (R2 = 0.99) (10)
where AT (cm2) is the actual total leaf area, and ATe (cm2) is
the estimated total leaf area. As seen from the slopes of the
regression lines, the estimated total leaf areas tended to be
less than the actual total leaf area in general. The high R2
values of the regression lines also revealed the consistency of
the underestimation. The average absolute errors of estima-
tion with their standard deviations were 4.32 µ2.42,
7.32 µ4.13, 9.40 µ5.50, and 11.25 µ7.23 cm2 for cabbage,
Chinese mustard, and the two amaranths, respectively. The
relative estimation errors were 16.0 µ6.4%, 17.0 µ9.8%,
24.9 µ8.1%, and 18.4 µ9.4%, respectively. The estimation
errors of total leaf area were greater than those of the
individual leaf area estimation in general. Besides tilting or
oblique orientation of leaves, the unsuccessful identification
of leaves also introduced error into the estimation of total leaf
area. Of the four vegetable seedlings, the estimation error of
TRANSACTIONS OF THE ASAE
 Table 1. Comparisons of computing time of ellipses detection for typical 5–leaf seedling
using the 3–step elliptical Hough transform and 1–pass exhaustive search algorithm.
Image Resolution
Image–Processing Algorithm 64 × 64 128 × 128 256 × 256
A. Computing time using the 3–step elliptical Hough transform (s) 13 16 39
B. Computing time using the brute–force search algorithm (s) 216 6620 208922
Computational advantage (B/A) 16.6 413.8 5357.0

Table 2. Summary of the estimation for leaf number of four different varieties of vegetable seedlings
Number of Actual Leaf Missed Leaf False Leaf Type I Error Type II Error
Seedlings Tested Number Number Number (%) (%)
Cabbage 28 63 6 5 8.70 7.94
Chinese mustard 11 57 7 10 10.94 17.54
Edible amaranth[a] 20 75 9 6 10.71 8.00
Edible amaranth[b] 15 58 5 5 7.94 8.62
Total 74 253 27 26 9.64 10.28
[a] A. mangostanus Linn.
[b] A. inamoenus Willd.

Figure 5. A comparison of actual leaf area and estimated leaf area of individual seedling leaves: (A) cabbage, (B) Chinese mustard, (C) edible amaranth
(A. mangostanus Linn.), and (D) edible amaranth (A. inamoenus Willd.).

the Chinese mustard seedlings was the smallest because their greater error of estimation. To circumvent this problem, one
leaves were planar and oriented more horizontally than the may consider obtaining extra information of leaf orientation
others. In contrast, the curly and tilted leaves of edible from side–view seedling images to correct the error, or use a
amaranth (A. mangostanus Linn.) seedlings resulted in calibration function such as equations 7 to 10 to correct the

Vol. 45(5): 1669–1677 1675

Figure 6. A comparison of actual total leaf area and estimated total leaf area of four different vegetable seedlings: (A) cabbage, (B) Chinese mustard,
(C) edible amaranth (A. mangostanus Linn.), and (D) edible amaranth (A. inamoenus Willd.).
underestimation of total leaf area for specific vegetable
seedling.
CONCLUSIONS
An image–processing algorithm using the elliptical
Hough transform to measure non–destructively the leaf area
of vegetable seedlings was developed in this research. The
3–step algorithm reduced significantly the computational
effort and memory requirement. This provides a practical
means to apply the algorithm to many applications such as
plant identification, classification, and robotic applications.
The unsupervised algorithm allowed for locating position
and horizontal orientation of seedlings leaves and estimation
of individual and total leaf area from the top–view image of
a seedling, even when seedling leaves were partly occluded.
The efficacy of the leaf locating and measurement algorithm
was tested with four varieties of vegetable seedlings at
various growth stages.
The experimental results revealed that the developed
algorithm could be used for leaf area measurement with
satisfactory accuracy. The sources of error were mainly due
to tilting or oblique orientation of seedling leaves, and
1676
unsuccessful identification of small or severely occluded
leaves of the seedling. The algorithm was most suitable for
leaf area measurement of seedlings with planar leaves with
horizontal orientation, such as Chinese mustard. For vegeta-
ble seedlings with tilting leaves, such as amaranth, the
estimation error became significant. It is suggested that
additional correction methods using calibration equations or
information extracted from side–view images could be used
to reduce the estimation error.
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