GEN RE: Types of Quantitative Data - Outline Methods

[Robert A. (Bob) Morris]

Stuart G. Poss writes:
 > Date:         Sat, 27 Nov 1999 10:47:58 -0700
>[...]
 > Elliptical Fourier transforms
>[... good reference list including Kuhl and Giardina 1982]

and also


Fourier Descriptors and Their Applications in Biology
by Pete E. Lestrel (Editor), Cambridge University Press, 1997.

As I recall, this has a paper using Kuhl and Giardina to identify
many species of oak and maple trees algorithmically.

As a biologically naive outsider, I would have thought that there is
an interesting problem of authority for statistical characters not
much different from other authority questions, namely
how/where/who/when were the statistical parameters estimated. My
impression about Elliptical Fourer Descriptors---which I think is a
neat idea---is that the literature is mostly devoted to showing that
they work, and not to otherwise collecting parameter estimates.

A student of mine implemented Kuhl and Giardina in matlab and my
recollection is that you can make EFD's independent of size and
orientation, so sloppy scanning can do pretty well. However, fall came
to New England, the semester and her interestd waned and we never
tested her implementation. If I'm right that this is robust to size
and orientation, then it would be a cute citizen science
application. People could send their leaf images to a central server,
and hordes of biology students could then quickly (or slowly) assign a
species in furtherence of the parameter estimate. David Hearn is doing
something like this at
http://ag.arizona.edu/~dhearn/help/PlantID.html.