Award Date
8-2010
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE)
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
First Committee Member
Emma E Regentova, Chair
Second Committee Member
Peter A Stubberud
Third Committee Member
Henry Selvaraj
Fourth Committee Member
Ajoy K Datta
Fifth Committee Member
Markus Berli
Number of Pages
56
Abstract
The rhizosphere, i.e. the zone of soil immediately surrounding plant roots plays a prominent role in supplying plants with water and nutrients. However, surprisingly little is known about rhizosphere physical properties and how they affect root growth, water and nutrient uptake. The lack of non-invasive and non-destructive imaging techniques necessary to observe living roots growing in undisturbed soil have been a main reason for this shortcoming. Recent advances in synchrotron X-ray micro tomography (CMT) provide the potential to directly observe soil physical properties around living roots in-situ.In this work we develop procedures for assisting scientist to study the soil properties by visualizing and automatically processing micro CT images. Specifically image de-noising in the wavelet domain is performed for convenient profiling and segmentation is applied for automated calculation of soil properties. As new measures we proposed the normalized radial and circular aggregation and water transportability and also have shown ways of generalizing the studies for 3D.
Keywords
Denoising; Plant-soil relationships; Rhizosphere; Segmentation; Soils; Thresholding; Water transportability; Wavelet shrinkage; X-ray micro tomography
Disciplines
Computer Engineering | Electrical and Electronics | Environmental Engineering
File Format
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Lupin Root Soil
NPillai2010_AppendixB_RootGlassBeads.pdf (20401 kB)
Repository Citation
Pillai, Natarajan S., "Automated procedures for quantification of rhizosphere physical properties in micro CT images" (2010). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 882.
http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/2229109
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Included in
Computer Engineering Commons, Electrical and Electronics Commons, Environmental Engineering Commons
Comments
Attached Files: Appendix A, Appendix B