Brainsignals submission to plant identification task at ImageCLEF 2012

This article describes our first participation to the plant identification task of ImageCLEF. We have approached it as intended with the least possible computer-vision related techniques (especially without costly image preprocessing and feature extraction) and as much as possible machine learning techniques (random forests). Our method is purely visual and entirely automatic, using only the image information. One should mention that the total time spent with preparing this submission was only about one week. The results were accordingly fairly poor, but probably usable for mobile applications, as the whole process of preprocessing and classification is very fast. We propose a slight modification to the Otsu algorithm, which makes it better suitable for the scan-like images.