A Method for Quantitative Analysis of Geometrical Structure of Animal Organs in Meso-Scale: The Dung Beetle Foreleg End Tooth as a Case Example

Abstract

The geometrical shapes of some animal organs have distinguished functions and properties that can provide useful information for bionic engineering applications. Hence, it is necessary to quantitatively measure the geometrical structure of those animal organs. However, some of the animal organs are tiny, complex and in the Meso-scale (0.1~10 mm). Their potential bionic application requires an accurate and efficient method to quantitatively analysis of their geometrical shapes. But existing methods are difficult and inefficient to quantitatively analysis. Yet, it was found that MATLAB image processing and computer vision technique can be advantageously exploited to obtain outer margin geometrical information from stereomicroscopy photograph. In this work, based on MATLAB, a program was designed and a method was proposed that specified for extract meso-scale animal organ outer margin contour points. The procedure for obtaining quantified geometrical information can be conclude as that stereomicroscope image of bionic object animal organ was prepared, the image to reduce noise interference was processed, the outer edge contour points was detected, and the points x and y coordinates data to computer database was stored. The foreleg of dung beetle Copris ochus Motschulsky, which is with special tooth-like structure for burrowing, the height of the end tooth is only around 1 mm and the width is about 0.5 mm, supported by this method, the outer edge profile of the foreleg end tooth was extracted from stereomicroscopy image with 669 × 727 pixels, about 1500 outer edge contour points was obtained, points x and y coordinates data were inputted to computer database for further analysis. This method is efficient, accurate and easy to adapt to quantitatively analysis of geometrical characteristic features of other animal organs in meso-scale.