Quantifying barley morphology using the Euler characteristic transform

Erik J Amezquita, Michelle Quigley, Tim Ophelders, Jacob Landis, Elizabeth Munch, Daniel Chitwood, Daniel Koenig

Keywords: Topological Data Analysis, Euler characteristic transform, barley inflorescence

TL;DR: Topological Data Analysis (especifically the Euler characteristic transform) effectively characterizes and distinguishes the shape of 28 different varieties of barley

Abstract: Shape is foundational to biology. Observing and documenting shape has fueled biological understanding, and from this perspective, it is also a type of data. The vision of topological data analysis, that data is shape and shape is data, will be relevant as biology transitions into a data-driven era where meaningful interpretation of large data sets is a limiting factor. We focus first on quantifying the morphology of barley spikes and seeds using topological descriptors based on the Euler characteristic. We then successfully train a support vector machine to classify 28 different varieties of barley based solely on the shape of their grains.

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