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Dayrell, Roberta L. C. ; Ott, Tankred ; Horrocks, Tom ; Poschlod, Peter

Automated extraction of seed morphological traits from images

Dayrell, Roberta L. C. , Ott, Tankred , Horrocks, Tom and Poschlod, Peter (2023) Automated extraction of seed morphological traits from images. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 14 (7), pp. 1708-1718.

Date of publication of this fulltext: 29 Sep 2023 14:39
Article
DOI to cite this document: 10.5283/epub.54773


Abstract

The description of biological objects, such as seeds, mainly relies on manual measurements of few characteristics, and on visual classification of structures, both of which can be subjective, error prone and time-consuming. Image analysis tools offer means to address these shortcomings, but we currently lack a method capable of automatically handling seeds from different taxa with varying ...

The description of biological objects, such as seeds, mainly relies on manual measurements of few characteristics, and on visual classification of structures, both of which can be subjective, error prone and time-consuming. Image analysis tools offer means to address these shortcomings, but we currently lack a method capable of automatically handling seeds from different taxa with varying morphological attributes and obtaining interpretable results. Here, we provide a simple image acquisition and processing protocol and introduce Traitor, an open-source software available as a command-line interface (CLI), which automates the extraction of seed morphological traits from images. The workflow for trait extraction consists of scanning seeds against a high-contrast background, correcting image colours, and analysing images with the software. Traitor is capable of processing hundreds of images of varied taxa simultaneously with just three commands, and without a need for training, manual fine-tuning or thresholding. The software automatically detects each object in the image and extracts size measurements, traditional morphometric descriptors widely used by scientists and practitioners, standardised shape coordinates, and colorimetric measurements. The method was tested on a dataset comprising of 91,667 images of seeds from 1228 taxa. Traitor's extracted average length and width values closely matched the average manual measurements obtained from the same collection (concordance correlation coefficient of 0.98). Further, we used a large image dataset to demonstrate how Traitor's output can be used to obtain representative seed colours for taxa, determine the phylogenetic signal of seed colour, and build objective classification categories for shape with high levels of visual interpretability. Our approach increases productivity and allows for large-scale analyses that would otherwise be unfeasible. Traitor enables the acquisition of data that are readily comparable across different taxa, opening new avenues to explore functional relevance of morphological traits and to advance on new tools for seed identification.



Involved Institutions


Details

Item typeArticle
Journal or Publication TitleMethods in Ecology and Evolution
Publisher:WILEY
Open Access Type:DEAL (Wiley Gold)
Place of Publication:HOBOKEN
Volume:14
Number of Issue or Book Chapter:7
Page Range:pp. 1708-1718
Date14 May 2023
InstitutionsBiology, Preclinical Medicine > Institut für Pflanzenwissenschaften > Lehrstuhl für Ökologie und Naturschutzbiologie (Prof. Dr. Peter Poschlod)
Biology, Preclinical Medicine > Institut für Pflanzenwissenschaften > Lehrstuhl für Ökologie und Naturschutzbiologie (Prof. Dr. Peter Poschlod)
Identification Number
ValueType
10.1111/2041-210X.14127DOI
KeywordsSHAPE; diaspores; high-throughput phenotyping; image segmentation; interpretability; morphological description; seed morphology; seed traits; trait measurement
Dewey Decimal Classification500 Science > 580 Botanical sciences
StatusPublished
RefereedYes, this version has been refereed
Created at the University of RegensburgYes
URN of the UB Regensburgurn:nbn:de:bvb:355-epub-547733
Item ID54773

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