Automatic extraction of leaf characters from herbarium specimens
Automatic extraction of leaf characters from herbarium specimens
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DOI：
10.1002/tax.611016
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发表时间：
2012-02-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Wilkin, Paul
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Corney, David P. A.;Clark, Jonathan Y.;Wilkin, Paul
植物标本室标本是植物分类学的重要资源。许多植物标本馆正在进行大规模的数字化项目，以改善获取和保存精美标本的机会，并在此过程中创建了大量的图像。叶片性状对植物分类群的描述和区分具有重要意义，可从植物标本馆标本中测定。在这里，我们证明了植物标本室图像可以使用合适的软件进行分析，并且可以自动提取叶片特征。我们描述了一个低成本的数字化过程，我们用它来创建一套1895年的图像或椴标本，以及新的植物图像处理软件。该软件的输出是一组叶子字符。作为该方法的演示，我们从整个植物标本馆标本的图像中自动提取大量叶片的长度和宽度。我们表明，我们提取的长度和宽度与已发表的栽培物种的值非常密切相关，但也始终较小。我们讨论了可能影响这种分析结果的植物标本的一些特殊特征，并考虑了在提取叶形和边缘特征等特征方面的进一步应用。
Herbarium specimens are a vital resource in botanical taxonomy. Many herbaria are undertaking large-scale digitization projects to improve access and to preserve delicate specimens, and in doing so are creating large sets of images. Leaf characters are important for describing taxa and distinguishing between them and they can be measured from herbarium specimens. Here, we demonstrate that herbarium images can be analysed using suitable software and that leaf characters can be extracted automatically. We describe a low-cost digitization process that we use to create a set of 1895 images or Tilia L. specimens, and novel botanical image processing software. The output of the software is a set of leaf characters. As a demonstration of this approach, we extract the length and width of a large number of leaves automatically from images of whole herbarium specimens. We show that the lengths and widths that we extract are very strongly correlated with values in a published account of cultivated species, but are also consistently smaller. We discuss some particular features of herbarium specimens that may affect the results of this form of analysis, and consider further applications to extract characters such as leaf shape and margin characters.