Symington Hamish A, Glover Beverley J
Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EA UK.
Plant Methods. 2019 Feb 22;15:19. doi: 10.1186/s13007-019-0403-2. eCollection 2019.
When taking photographs of plants in the field, it is often necessary to record additional information such as sample number, biological replicate number and subspecies. Manual methods of recording such information are slow, often involve laborious transcription from hand-written notes or the need to have a laptop or tablet on site, and present a risk by separating written data capture from image capture. Existing tools for field data capture focus on recording information rather than capturing pictures of plants.
We present SpotCard, a tool comprising two macros. The first can be used to create a template for small, reusable cards for use when photographing plants. Information can be encoded on these cards in a human- and machine-readable form, allowing the user to swiftly make annotations before taking the photograph. The second part of the tool automatically reads the annotations from the image and tabulates them in a CSV file, along with picture date, time and GPS coordinates. The SpotCard also provides a convenient scale bar and coordinate location within the image for the flower itself, enabling automated measurement of floral traits such as area and perimeter.
This tool is shown to read annotations with a high degree of accuracy and at a speed greatly faster than manual transcription. It includes the ability to read the date and time of the photograph, as well as GPS location. It is an open-source ImageJ/Fiji macro and is available online. Its use requires no knowledge of the ImageJ macro coding language, and it is therefore well suited to all researchers taking pictures in the field.
在野外拍摄植物照片时，通常需要记录额外的信息，如样本编号、生物学重复编号和亚种。手动记录此类信息速度较慢，往往需要费力地从手写笔记中转录，或者需要在现场配备笔记本电脑或平板电脑，并且将书面数据采集与图像采集分开存在风险。现有的野外数据采集工具侧重于记录信息，而不是拍摄植物照片。
我们展示了SpotCard，这是一个包含两个宏的工具。第一个宏可用于为拍摄植物时使用的小型可重复使用卡片创建模板。信息可以以人类和机器可读的形式编码在这些卡片上，允许用户在拍摄照片之前迅速进行注释。该工具的第二部分会自动从图像中读取注释，并将它们与图片日期、时间和GPS坐标一起整理到一个CSV文件中。SpotCard还为花朵本身在图像中提供了方便的比例尺和坐标位置，能够自动测量花朵的特征，如面积和周长。
该工具被证明能够以高度的准确性读取注释，且速度比手动转录快得多。它具备读取照片日期和时间以及GPS位置的能力。它是一个开源的ImageJ/Fiji宏，可在线获取。其使用不需要了解ImageJ宏编码语言，因此非常适合所有在野外拍照的研究人员。
