PhotoQuad is a custom software for advanced image processing of 2D photographic quadrat samples, dedicated to ecological applications. The system is designed to integrate all major 2D base analyses used in marine biology and ecology for studying biodiversity of sessile communities through photographic sampling. PhotoQuad is equipped with tools for automatic quadrat boundary detection, image calibration, image enhancement, multi-scale image segmentation, management of user-specific species libraries, random point counts, species counts, grid cell counts, estimation of absolute or relative-to-quadrat area and coverage, extraction of advanced 2D morphometric descriptors such as centroid or perimeter roughness, as well as several annotation, measurement or image metadata tools. These are functional in a layer-based environment, allowing the efficient and rapid processing of photoquadrat datasets under an integrated format.
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