Parametric mapping of cellular morphology in plant tissue sections by gray level granulometry

BACKGROUND: The cellular morphology of plant organs is strongly related to other physical properties such as shape, size, growth, mechanical properties or chemical composition. Cell morphology often vary depending on the type of tissue, or on the distance to a specific tissue. A common challenge in quantitative plant histology is to quantify not only the cellular morphology, but also its variations within the image or the organ. Image texture analysis is a fundamental tool in many areas of image analysis, that was proven efficient for plant histology, but at the scale of the whole image. RESULTS: This work presents a method that generates a parametric mapping of cellular morphology within images of plant tissues. It is based on gray level granulometry from mathematical morphology for extracting image texture features, and on Centroidal Voronoi Diagram for generating a partition of the image. Resulting granulometric curves can be interpreted either through multivariate data analysis or by using summary features corresponding to the local average cell size. The resulting parametric maps describe the variations of cellular morphology within the organ. CONCLUSIONS: We propose a methodology for the quantification of cellular morphology and of its variations within images of tissue sections. The results should help understanding how the cellular morphology is related to genotypic and / or environmental variations, and clarify the relationships between cellular morphology and chemical composition of cell walls.