Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

# Analytical Study of Colour Spaces for Plant Pixel Detection

Version 1 : Received: 15 December 2017 / Approved: 15 December 2017 / Online: 15 December 2017 (16:52:23 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Kumar, P.; Miklavcic, S.J. Analytical Study of Colour Spaces for Plant Pixel Detection. J. Imaging 2018, 4, 42. Kumar, P.; Miklavcic, S.J. Analytical Study of Colour Spaces for Plant Pixel Detection. J. Imaging 2018, 4, 42.

Journal reference: J. Imaging 2018, 4, 42
DOI: 10.3390/jimaging4020042

## Abstract

Segmentation of a region of interest is an important pre-processing step for many colour image analysis techniques. Similarly segmentation of plant in digital images is an important preprocessing step in phenotying plants by image analysis. In this paper we present an analytical study to statistically determine the suitability of colour space representation of an image to best detect plant pixels and separate them from background pixels. Our hypothesis is that the colour space representation in which the separation of the distributions representing plant pixels and background pixels is maximized would be the best for detection of plant pixels. The two classes of pixels are modelled as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). In our GM modelling we don't make any prior assumption about the number of Gaussians in the model. Rather a constant bandwidth mean-shift filter is used to cluster the data and the number of clusters and hence the number of Gaussians is automatically determined. Here we have analysed following representative colour spaces like $RGB$, $rgb$, $HSV$, $Ycbcr$ and $CIE-Lab$. This is because these colour spaces represent several other similar colour spaces and also an exhaustive study of all the colour space will be too voluminous. We also analyse the colour space feature from the two-class variance ratio perspective and compare the results of our hypothesis with this metric. The dataset for this empirical study consist of 378 digital images of plants and their manual segmentation. Dataset consist of various species of plants (arabidopsi, tobacco, wheat, rye grass etc.) imaged under different lighting conditions, indoor and outdoor, controlled and uncontrolled background. In results we obtain better segmentation of the plants in $HSV$ colour space, which is supported by its Earth mover distance (EMD) on the GMM distribution of plant and background pixels.

## Subject Areas

Plant phenotyping, Plant pixel classification, Colour space, , Gaussian mixture model, Earth mover distance, Variance ratio, Plant segmentation.

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