The document discusses the design and development of an automated plant identification system called SBLRS (Shape Based Leaf Recognition System), which utilizes leaf shape for identification. The system addresses the challenges of plant diversity and inter-species similarity by providing an efficient method for recognizing over 400,000 plant species using image processing techniques. It outlines the need for automating plant identification, the methodology for generating feature vectors based on leaf characteristics, and compares SBLRS's effectiveness with existing contour-based methods.