Abstract This paper proposes a novel methodology of characterizing and recognizing plant leaves using a combination of texture and shape features. Texture of the leaf is modeled using Gabor filter and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) while shape of the leaf is captured using a set of curvelet transform coefficients together with invariant moments. Since these features are in general sensitive to the orientation and scaling of the leaf image, a pre-processing stage prior to feature extraction is applied to make corrections for varying translation, rotation and scaling factors. Efficacy of the proposed methods is studied by using two neural classifiers: a neuro-fuzzy controller (NFC) and a feed-forward back-propagation multi-layered perceptron (MLP) to discriminate between 31 classes of leaves. The features have been applied individually as well as in combination to investigate how recognition accuracies can be improved. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective in recognizing leaves with varying texture, shape, size and orientations to an acceptable degree. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.