Alexis de Tocqueville; chronicler of the American democratic experiment

[Abstract]: The purpose of this work is to develop an interactive tool which helps botanists to extract the vein system with its hierarchical properties with as little user interaction as possible. In this paper, we present a new venation extraction method using independent component analysis (ICA). The popular and efficient FastICA algorithm is applied to patches of leaf images to learn a set of linear basis functions or features for the images and then the basis functions are used as the pattern map for vein extraction. In our experiments, the training sets are randomly generated from different leaf images. Experimental results demonstrate that ICA is a promising technique for extracting leaf veins and edges of objects. ICA, therefore, can play an important role in automatically identifying living plants