An Open Source Plugin for Image Analysis in Biology

Abstract

Image analysis is an important tool for several application fields, like biology and especially botany. Analysis of seed fossils can provide important information about their evolution, on agriculture origin, on plants domestication and knowledge of diets in ancient times. The aim of this work is to make the analysis process simple for biologists, by obtaining all the features needed for botanist user through a unique framework, that is still not available at the moment. We propose an ImageJ plugin able to extract morphological, textural and color features from seeds images in order to use them for classification. The experimental results have confirmed the goodness and correctness of the extracted features, making the proposed framework easily extendable to other application domains.