Search for: All records

Phenotypic analysis from digital photographs is a useful tool in bioinformatics, and it has become increasingly important in the study of museum specimens as more natural history museum archives are digitized. However, steep learning curves and high costs associated with currently available image analysis software limits archive use by undergraduates, K-12 students, researchers at smaller educational institutions, and citizen scientists. We have created the Scientific Image Analysis (SIA) application to overcome these limitations with software that is freely available to any user and has an intuitive interface. SIA includes tools to measure length, angle, color and area from digital photographs, and includes tools to correct for color biases and skew from the perspective of the photograph. In this short paper we test these tools and their repeatability by measuring 497 avian museum specimens. We have quantified variation in bill length, angle of curvature of the bill, and plumage color. We find that measurements from SIA tools were highly repeatable across measurers, across replicate photographs of the same specimen, and were robust to user choices within SIA tools. Index Terms—bioinformatics, color correction, graphical output, image analysis, morphometrics, museum specimens