SHAPE

Quantitative evaluation of the shapes of biological organs is often required in various research fields, such as agronomy, medicine, genetics, ecology and taxonomy. Elliptic Fourier descriptors (EFDs) can delineate any type of shape with a closed two-dimensional contour, and have been effectively applied to the evaluation of various biological shapes in animals and plants. Quantization of shapes is a prerequisite for evaluating the inheritance of morphological traits in quantitative genetics. However, quantization of shapes is not easy for a general researcher. SHAPE was developed for general application of the method based on EFDs. SHAPE extracts the contour shape from a full color bitmap image, delineates the contour shape with the EFDs, and finally performs the principal component analysis of the EFDs for summarizing the shape information. With the aid of this package, a researcher can easily analyze shapes on a personal computer without special knowledge about the procedures related to the method.