Semi-local extraction of ring structures in images of biological hard tissues: application to the Bayesian interpretation of fish otoliths for age and growth estimation

Overview & Synopsis

This paper deals with the analysis of images of biological tissue that involves ring structures, such as tree trunks, bivalve seashells or fish otoliths, with a view to automating the acquisition of age and growth data. A bottom-up template-based scheme extracts meaningfulridge and valley curve data using growth-adapted time-frequency filtering. Age and growth estimation is then stated as the Bayesian selection of a subset of ring curves, combining ameasure of curve significativity and ana prioristatistical growth model. Experiments on realsamples demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed extraction stage. Our Bayesian frameworkis shown to significantly outperform previous methods for the interpretation of a dataset of200 plaice otoliths and compares favorably to inter-expert agreement rates (88% of agreement to expert interpretations).