ABCOT
Avian plumage coloration is known to be responsible for many important functions like species identification, camouflage, understanding evolutionary relationships and impact of environmental conditions on habitat and breeding. Bird plumage color quantification refers to the approach of characterizing the plumage coloration observed in individual birds using colorimetric values such as the hue, saturation, brightness,patch size and is an important trait for ecologists. Current color quantification approaches require the user to manually draw a closed contour that encloses the plumage color patch to be analyzed, using an image editing software. Such manual scoring approaches are extremely time consuming and prone to problems like low repeatability and inter observer errors. There is therefore a need for an automated system for plumage color extraction and quantification. The Automated Bird ColOration QuanTification software developed at the IVU lab is a completely automated system that extracts and quantifies plumage coloration in digital images. It has a simple GUI interface that provides the user with different options for storing results and batch processing of images. The various output options include the option to save coloration values in an excel sheet and the option to save an output image that shows a closed contour enclosing the extracted plumage patch in the original image.