Fourier transform methods in image analysis of compression wood at the cellular level

Abstract

Compression wood affects the overall quality of construction timber and paper quality. We have investigated the microscopic features of lumen shape and tracheid shape for compression wood studies and detection in softwoods. In this paper, we describe a method for directly analyzing tracheid and lumen shape over an entire image. The method uses the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and reduces the two-dimensional image data to one-dimensional data, from which lumen and tracheid shape can be evaluated. We illustrate the method by comparison of compression wood images to normal wood images. The results of detecting severe compression wood were successful, while the detection of weak compression wood was not satisfactory.