Basic study on contour tracing method in softwood cell contour extraction

The application of digital image analysis to calculate the parameters of softwood cells and to understand their microstructure is of importance in the area of basic micro-wood research such as wood anatomy. In order to obtain cell parameters, the most important part is to separate the cells from their background in an image, which is accomplished by drawing cell contours. In this study, a contour tracing method based on digital image binarization is introduced to extract the contours of softwood cells. As well, a comparison with other traditional methods is included. The results show that using this contour tracing method, clear and complete contours can be obtained, which solves the problems of traditional methods where sharp corners and turning points in an image could not be addressed.