Image analysis, an approach to measure grass roots from images

Abstract: In this project a method to analyse images is presented. The images document the development of grassroots in a tilled field in order to study the movement of nitrate in the field. The final aim of the image analysis is to estimate the volume of dead and living roots in the soil. Since the roots and the soil have a broad and overlapping range of colours the fundamental problem is to find the roots in the images. Earlier methods for analysis of root images have used methods based on thresholds to extract the roots. To use a threshold the pixels of the object must have a unique range of colours separating them from the colour of the background, this is not the case for the images in this project. Instead the method uses a neural network to classify the individual pixels. In this paper a complete method to analyse images is presented and although the results are far from perfect, the method gives interesting results