6 research outputs found

    Man, plant remains, diet: spread and ecology of Prunus L. in Sardinia

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    Archaeobotany offers the opportunity to explore the various practices related to the use of wild plants and understand how these have been selected for domestication. The identification of wild and cultivated plants could facilitate the understanding of the role they have in the subsistence economy and how this is strictly related to dietary habits. The main goals of this thesis are to interpret and understand the relation between human communities and the exploitation of plant resources in the past, thus understanding agricultural and alimentary behaviors in the present time. The genus Prunus has been selected because understudied in Sardinia from the archaeobotanical point of view but fairly widespread in the Mediterranean archaeological contexts. The application of image analysis technique for an adequate definition of the endocarp morpho-colorimetric and morphometric parameters represents an important diagnostic factor in the Prunus taxonomy studies and consequently may be helpful for the improvement of the management and in the enhancement of ancient fruit. The study of traditional varieties aims to create models of development, recovery and enhancement of ancient fruit. Also sets the basis for proposals for the recovery of cultural traditions and local economies. For the first time, it was possible to investigate about the morphology and morphometry of P. domestica endocarps of traditional local varieties from Sardinia. Endocarp morpho-colorimetric features, EFDs and Haralick’s descriptors obtained by image analysis allowed to implement a statistical classifier able to identify and classify the studied varieties of P. domestica, identifying plausible synonymy groups and confirming that the endocarp retain some characters directly related to the fruit skin color. The discovery of well-preserved waterlogged endocarps of P. domestica from the Phoenician-Punic settlement of Santa Giusta could be evidence that the introduction of primitive cultivated forms of plums in Sardinia have been introduced by the Phoenicians people. Moreover, these endocarps represent the oldest findings and they are the oldest evidence of cultivated plums in the western Mediterranean Basin. Finally, for the first time, it was possible to investigate through image analysis system about the morphology and morphometry of archaeological P. spinosa endocarps from Sardinia. These sites are currently the only finds of P. spinosa remains in waterlogged conditions documented in Sardinia by archaeological sources. Thanks to image analysis system it was possible to understand the hypothetical origin

    Discovering Plum, Watermelon and Grape Cultivars Founded in a Middle Age Site of Sassari (Sardinia, Italy) through a Computer Image Analysis Approach

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    The discovery of several waterlogged plant remains in a Middle Ages context (1330–1360 AD) in Sassari (NS, Sardinia, Italy) enabled the characterisation of archaeological plum fruit stones and watermelon and grape seeds through computer image analysis. Digital seed/endocarp images were acquired by a flatbed scanner and processed and analysed by applying computerised image analysis techniques. The morphometric data were statistically elaborated using stepwise linear discriminant analysis (LDA), allowing comparisons among archaeological remains, wild populations and autochthonous cultivars. Archaeological samples of plum were compared with 21 autochthonous cultivars of Prunus domestica from Sardinia, while archaeological watermelon seeds were compared with 36 seed lots of Citrullus from Europe, Africa and Asia. Moreover, archaeological grape seeds were compared with 51 autochthonous traditional cultivars of Vitis vinifera subsp. vinifera from Sardinia, 16 cultivars from Tuscany, six cultivars from Liguria, and eight cultivars from Catalonia (Spain). Archaeological plum remains showed morphological affinity with five cultivars of Sardinia. Seed features of the archaeological watermelon remains demonstrated affiliation with a proper sweet dessert watermelon, Citrullus lanatus, and similarity with some Sardinian cultivars. Regarding the archaeological remains of grape, morphometric comparisons showed a high similarity with autochthonous cultivars from Catalonia and Liguria. This study provides new information about ancient fruit cultivated and consumed during the Middle Ages in Sardinia

    Morpho-Colorimetric Characterization of the Sardinian Endemic Taxa of the Genus Anchusa L. by Seed Image Analysis

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    In this work, the seed morpho-colorimetric differentiation of the Sardinian endemic species of Anchusa (Boraginaceae) was evaluated. In Sardinia, the Anchusa genus includes the following seven taxa: A. capellii, A. crispa ssp. crispa, A. crispa ssp. maritima, A. formosa, A. littorea, A. montelinasana, and A. sardoa. Seed images were acquired using a flatbed scanner and analyzed using the free software package ImageJ. A total of 74 seed morpho-colorimetric features of 2692 seed lots of seven taxa of Anchusa belonging to 17 populations were extrapolated and used to build a database of seed size, shape, and color features. The data were statistically elaborated by the stepwise linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to compare and discriminate each accession and taxon. In addition, the seed morpho-colorimetric differences among coastal and mountainous taxa were evaluated. Considering the ecological conditions, the LDA was able to discriminate among the Anchusa taxa with a correct identification of 87.4% and 90.8% of specimens for mountainous and coastal plants, respectively. Moreover, the LDA of the 17 populations of Anchusa showed a low separation among species and populations within the coastal group, highlighting how the long-distance dispersal by flotation on the sea water surface and the pollination network may influence the similarity patterns observed. In addition, a misattribution was observed for A. crispa ssp. crispa, which was misclassified as A. crispa ssp. maritima in 14.1% of cases, while A. crispa ssp. maritima was misidentified as A. crispa ssp. crispa in 21.1% of cases, highlighting a close phenotypic relationship between these two taxa. The statistical results obtained through the seed image analysis showed that the morpho-colorimetric features of the seeds provide important information about the adaptation and evolution of Anchusa taxa in Sardinia

    On the efficacy of handcrafted and deep features for seed image classification

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    Computer vision techniques have become important in agriculture and plant sciences due to their wide variety of applications. In particular, the analysis of seeds can provide meaningful information on their evolution, the history of agriculture, the domestication of plants, and knowledge of diets in ancient times. This work aims to propose an exhaustive comparison of several different types of features in the context of multiclass seed classification, leveraging two public plant seeds data sets to classify their families or species. In detail, we studied possible optimisations of five traditional machine learning classifiers trained with seven different categories of handcrafted features. We also fine-tuned several well-known convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the recently proposed SeedNet to determine whether and to what extent using their deep features may be advantageous over handcrafted features. The experimental results demonstrated that CNN features are appropriate to the task and representative of the multiclass scenario. In particular, SeedNet achieved a mean F-measure of 96%, at least. Nevertheless, several cases showed satisfactory performance from the handcrafted features to be considered a valid alternative. In detail, we found that the Ensemble strategy combined with all the handcrafted features can achieve 90.93% of mean F-measure, at least, with a considerably lower amount of times. We consider the obtained results an excellent preliminary step towards realising an automatic seeds recognition and classification framework

    Phenotypic identification of plum varieties (Prunus domestica L.) by endocarps morpho-colorimetric and textural descriptors

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    The identification of plum varieties is generally done on the base of distinctive plant traits such as shape, size, and fruit drupe color identified during the variety registration, following official descriptors. In this paper, image analysis techniques were applied to study endocarps variability of 23 Prunus domestica cultivars from Sardinia. Digital images were acquired and analysed using a macro specifically developed to measure morpho-colorimetric endocarps features. The data were later statistically processed applying the stepwise Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to implement a statistical classifier able to classify each variety and identify plausible synonymy groups. The present study represent the first attempt to investigate the morphology and morphometry of plum endocarps in order to characterize the whole Sardinian plum agrobiodiversity. It is also the evidence of the usefulness of image analysis techniques in taxonomic investigations too, as well as for the conservation and enhancement of traditional plums for consumer satisfaction
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