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The cellular morphology of plant organs is strongly related to other physical properties such as the size, shape, mechanical properties, or chemical composition of the plant or plant organ. Cellular morphology often varies depending on the type of tissue or position in a specific tissue.

A common challenge in quantitative plant histology is to quantify not only the cellular morphology but also how it varies within the image or the plant organ.

Image texture analysis is a fundamental part of the image analysis toolbox that has proven invaluable for describing plant cell morphology when individual cells are hard to isolate. As a rule, it is applied at whole-image scale, which narrows the scope for analysis of spatial heterogeneity.

We have developed a method that generates a parametric map of cellular morphology in images of plant tissues by working up from microscopy or microscopy images.

The results inform understanding how the cellular morphology is related to genotypic and/or environmental variations, and to clarify the relationships between cellular morphology and other key plant tissue descriptors, such as chemical composition of the cell walls.

The method yields quantitative data, so results can readily be integrated to produce representative statistical models of single plant tissue or organ. The workflow is essentially generic, so it can be applied to other types of images, including images from food products that present a clear visual texture.