B-Spline models (colored lines) fit to a video image of a fly wing.
We have developed a set of software and associated hardware tools to automate the recovery of data on vein placement in the wings of Drosophila species. The user supplies two landmark points, and the software does the rest. It essentially reduces this image to an "instant wing" summed up in only 50 coordinate pairs.
B-Spline models (colored lines) fit to a video image of a fly wing.
The best part is that this wing was still attached to a live fly. Thanks to a simple suction device inspired by Ken Weber, we can handle live flies with no harm coming to them.
We are now making the software available, and the following supplementary material.
| Automated Measurement of Drosophila Wings Houle, et al. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 3:25. | This paper gives a reasonably thorough description of the hardware and software we use. Repeatabilities and example results are given for species data and in a selection experiment. The wing-handling device and the general approach to feature extraction may be of interest to those working on other insect systems. |
| Using FINDWING (pdf 70kb) | The heart of the image analysis system is a C program called FINDWING.This document describes how to use this program by itself. It also describes the kind of images and associated files needed to use the program. Anyone wishing a copy of the source code should contact me directly. |
| FINDWING.EXE (266kb) | This is an executable of the FINDWING program itself, that can be executed according to the instructions in Using FINDWING. Anyone wishing a copy of the source code should contact me directly at dhoule@bio.fsu.edu. |
| Batch processing (328kb) | We use FINDWING in combination with S-Plus scripts to automate both the splining and the checking and editing of the data. This ZIP file contains BFINDWING.EXE, a version suitable for batch processing, four S-Plus scripts, and instructions on how to use them. |
| Example data (972kb) | This provides a small set of 20 images with their associated files which FINDWING or the batch processing files can be run on. |
| USEFUL JAVA PROGRAMS | |
| MVE: Minimum volume ellipsoid outlier detection | This JAVA program implements the MVE outlier detection algorithm (Rousseeuw and van Zomeren 1990. J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 85, 633-639 and refs. therein) that we use on our large wing data sets. Cite this as: Kim van der Linde (2004) MVE: Minimum Volume Ellipsoid estimation for robust outlier detection in multivariate space, Java version. |
| RMA: Reduced Major Axis Regression | This JAVA program implements reduced major axis regression, that is regression where both variables are measured with error. Cite as Andrew J. Bohonak & Kim van der Linde (2004) RMA: Software for Reduced Major Axis regression, Java version. |
| THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE | |
|
Links to companies that make the commercially available software we use in connection with the WINGMACHINE system. |
|
| TPS software | TPSDig and TPSRegr gather and manipulate geometric morphometric data. These excellent programs are written by F. James Rohlf, SUNY Stony Brook. Distributed without charge. This web site also lists many other useful morphometric programs. |
| ACDSee | An inexpensive TIFF viewer with nice capabilities for viewing multiple images quickly. A freeware version is available. |
| ImagePro Plus | ImagePro is a full-featured low-level image processing package. Its programming language is the reason that we use it. It is however quite expensive. This is available from Media Cybernetics. |
Post-doctoral fellow Kim van der Linde is currently occupied in porting much of the system to JAVA, where it will be much easier to set up on a new machine. This software is being tested and still has a few bugs, so we have not posted it here yet. If you are interested, you may contact us directly to see if the software is ready for release.
Production of this software and web site was supported by NSF grant DEB 019129
and NSERC.