Le Van, L., Beurton-Aimar, M., Salmon, J.P., Marie,A., Parisey,N.
Abstract:
Studying links between phenotype/genotype and agricultural practices is one of the main topics in agronomy research. Phenotypes can be characterized by informations like age, sex of animals/plants and more and more often with the help of image analysis of their morphology. From now, getting good quality of images for numerous individuals is easy but that leads to design automatic procedures to replace manual exploration of such amount of images. Several bottlenecks have been identified to analyze automatically images. Well-known one is setting automatically morphometric landmarks. It exists a lot of methods to experiment landmarks setting, this work has been initiated by using the article of Palaniswamy et al. (2010) using a method based on the probabilistic Hough transform coupling to a template matching algorithm. We have applied to a set of $291$ images of beetle mandibles. The first part of the project was to test how the Palaniswamy"s method could be used to analyze them. We have implemented all the required algorithms to compute positions of mandibles landmarks and compared the obtained results to landmarks which have been manually set by biologists. We will see that if we use centroid size to characterize mandibles, the size computed from
automatic landmarks is close to the one computed from manual ones. Future works will focus on definition of a semi-landmarks procedure which would add some features as the measure of the curve between two landmarks.