By Lakhdar Lamari New 2.0 Version Coming Soon! Quickly and easily quantify plant diseases with Assess: Image Analysis Software for Plant Disease Quantification. Rapid measurement of leaf area, percent disease, root length, lesion count, percent of ground cover, and other calculations and applications are made simple with this versatile and affordable software. Use Assess as an interactive laboratory tool for real-time length and area measurements of user-selected objects or quickly and accurately compare fungicide and herbicide treatments. Save your data into an Excel-compatible spreadsheet or copy-and-paste them into other applications. The colorful and intuitive Windows-based interface makes image analysis and plant disease quantification simple – even for the novice computer user – and Assess is hardware independent, requiring only a computer with a 32-bit computer operating system. The program supports Twain-compliant imaging devices such as scanners, frame grabbers, or digital cameras for image acquisition, although images can be imported from any computer drive, CD-Rom, network or other applications. Assess is compatible with most standard graphic file formats. Accompanied by a text-book-quality user manual with sixteen easy-to-follow tutorials, Assess makes learning and training fascinating and fun. Automated installation is hassle-free, allowing users to start working on plant disease quantification immediately. Optimized for use in plant pathology and agronomy, this revolutionary new tool produces invaluable results for plant pathologists, agronomists, plant breeders, horticultural scientists and anyone needing to analyze, quantify and measure plant disease. What is Assess? Assess is an application of existing image analysis algorithms to disease measurement. It is not a general-purpose image analysis software package. There are several commercial and non-commercial packages available for image enhancement and analysis, which are far more comprehensive, but also far more complex and costly. Who needs Assess? It is primarily intended for researchers who routinely perform disease measurements on large numbers of samples, without prior knowledge of image analysis concepts and computer programming. What can you do with Assess? Even though Assess is optimized for disease measurement, it is flexible enough to be used as a laboratory tool for measurement, image enhancement and archiving. The kind of measurements performed is not limited to plants or plant diseases. Generally, if the objects of interest can be selected (separated from the background), they can be measured. How does Assess work? The principle behind Assess is simple. All measurements are based on objects selected by the user and overlaid on the original image. What is shown on-screen is what is measured. The selection of the objects is interactive through an intuitive user interface. The problem of “eye-balling” a leaf to determine the percent infection is replaced with one of “matching” surfaces. The user interactively sets threshold levels, using a slider, and Assess automatically translates the user action on the slider into an overlay over the original color image. Once the overlaid image adequately covers the object(s) of interest, the work is done. One simply chooses a measurement and clicks the appropriate button. In short, Assess reduces the complex problem of disease quantification to a simple shape-filling exercise. The process by which we visually assess diseases may appear to be very simple to the human brain, but presents several problems when implemented on a machine. The approach taken in Assess is to reduce the process into basic and meaningful components. 1. Defining the problem: An image of a typical diseased leaf consists of a background, “healthy” tissue and “not-healthy” tissue. If we were to carry out accurate disease measurement “by hand,” we would automatically recognize that the background is not of interest and ignore it. We would then measure the area of the entire leaf using a mechanical device, or derive an estimate of the area from simple measurements (length, width, etc.) by mathematical techniques. We would then process the lesions in a similar fashion (to get the total area occupied by the lesions). Finally, we would compute the ratio of lesions to the total leaf area. 2. Implementing a solution: From its inception, Assess was designed and optimized to handle the difficult issue of quantifying plant diseases, with no prior knowledge of the type of disease. Regardless of the disease to be measured, the same basic components need to be isolated and measured: a. Separation of the leaf from the background b. Separation of the lesions (diseased tissue) from the healthy tissue within the boundary of the leaf. The separation of the leaf from the background or the lesions from the leaf requires that the two components differ in some property, e.g., color or brightness. Assess relies heavily on the Hue-Saturation-Intensity color model (explained in the Appendix) to enable the user to effectively extract the leaf from the background and then the lesions from the leaf. Since we do not know in advance about the specifics of any disease, the user is given a major role in determining what needs to be measured. The effectiveness of Assess in providing an acceptable solution to the problem of disease quantification is due mainly to the fact that it provides the user with great flexibility in using and combining different color models (RGB and HIS) and color planes to extract the various required components. 3. The user interface: To reduce the learning curve, the user interface of Assess was designed specifically to deal with disease quantification and other types of measurements needed by plant pathologists, agronomists, and other scientists. Many tasks were combined and presented to the user as action buttons on a specialized control panel (the Threshold Panel). These action buttons would have required the use of macros, scripts or programming in other image analysis software packages. With the simplification of the user interface and customization to make the various tasks almost transparent to the user, Assess is highly suited to individuals with little or no knowledge of computer science and image analysis. Requirements: 32-bit Windows Operating System (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, or XP). PLEASE READ LICENSE INFORMATION BEFORE ORDERING. Multiple User Version Also Available! Hit the order button to order the Single User Version. |
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