Re: Root

Posted by Pedro Miguel César de Carvalho on Mar 30, 2006; 10:45am
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/Root-tp3703253p3703259.html

Thank for your reply Xavier,
My roots are grown in 15 x 150 cm columns with sandy loam soil. The  
root extraction procedure is very simple, first I open the column in  
two halves, and then I take slices of soil (5 of 20 cm and 2 of 25  
cm), I first clean the roots with a Delta-t root washer (http://
www.delta-t.co.uk/products.html?product2005092818891) after that I do  
a manual fine clean. Than we have a A4 transparency root scanner. The  
images that we will get are in Tiff format, gray scale (256 grays) at  
300 dpi. The good thing of WinRhizo is that it does everything  
without knowing nothing about it, I think that I can get the  
algorithms of WinRhizo from the users manual, maybe then it maybe  
possible to develop a new plugin for ImageJ. Unfortunately the images  
I have know are in a Windows 98 PC without internet and CD-R, it just  
have Zip drive, that I do not have in my PowerBook. I have to install  
the driver of my USB disk on the PC then I can send you the images,  
but they are grayscale very clean root pictures. There is a clear  
distinction between the root (usually dark grey or black) and the  
background (usually white or very light grey), the problem is only  
the white tips that even the WinRhizo can't differentiate from the  
background  automatically, but adjusting the threshold or manually  
editing the image in photoshop we can make the software understand  
what is root and what is background.

Pedro