Fan-Beam Binarization Difference Projection (FB-BDP): A Novel Local Object Descriptor for Fine-Grained Leaf Image Retrieval

Fine-grained leaf image retrieval (FGLIR) aims to search similar leaf images in subspecies level which involves very high interclass visual similarity and accordingly poses great challenges to leaf image description. In this study, we introduce a new concept, named fan-beam binarization difference projection (FB-BDP) to address this challenging issue. It is designed based on the theory of fan-beam projection (FBP) which is a mathematical tool originally used for computed tomographic reconstruction of objects and has the merits of capturing the inner structure information of objects in multiple directions and excellent ability to suppress image noise. However, few studies have been made to apply FBP to the description of texture patterns. Rather than calculating ray integrals over the whole object area, FB-BDP restricts its ray integrals calculated over local patches to guarantee the locality of the extracted features. By binarizing the intensity-differences between the off-center and center rays, FB-BDP enable its ray integrals insensitive to illumination change and more discriminative in the characterization of texture patterns. In additional, due to inheriting the merits of FBP, the proposed FB-BDP is superior over the existing local image descriptors by its invariance to scaling transformation, robustness to noise, and strong ability to capture direction and structure texture patterns. The results of extensive experiments on FGLIR show its higher retrieval accuracy over the benchmark methods, promising generalization power and strong complementarity to deep features.