Extraction and interpretation of ring structures in images of biological hard tissues: application to fish age and growth estimation

This paper presents a general framework for the automated estimation of age and growth from images of biological materials depicting concentric ring-like structures such as tree trunks, corals, bivalve seashells, fish scales or otoliths. This interpretation task can be seen as a ring segmentation issue, where growth rings are associated to image ridge and valley structures. This is stated as the Bayesian selection of a subset of partial ring curves extracted using a semi-local template-based growth-adapted scheme. The application to fish otolith interpretation provides a consistent and convincing validation of the proposed framework.