Assessment of Shape Changes of Mistletoe Berries: A New Software Approach to Automatize the Parameterization of Path Curve Shaped Contours

Renatus Derbidge, Linus Feiten, Oliver Conradt, Peter Heusser and Stephan Baumgartner

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 4, 1-9

Abstract: Photographs of mistletoe (Viscum album L.) berries taken by a permanently fixed camera during their development in autumn were subjected to an outline shape analysis by fitting path curves using a mathematical algorithm from projective geometry. During growth and maturation processes the shape of mistletoe berries can be described by a set of such path curves, making it possible to extract changes of shape using one parameter called Lambda. Lambda describes the outline shape of a path curve. Here we present methods and software to capture and measure these changes of form over time. The present paper describes the software used to automatize a number of tasks including contour recognition, optimization of fitting the contour via hill-climbing, derivation of the path curves, computation of Lambda and blinding the pictures for the operator. The validity of the program is demonstrated by results from three independent measurements showing circadian rhythm in mistletoe berries. The program is available as open source and will be applied in a project to analyze the chronobiology of shape in mistletoe berries and the buds of their host trees.

Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0060522 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 60522&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0060522

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060522

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().