ROXAS X - A next-generation version of the image analysis tool for quantifying xylem anatomy

Wood anatomy provides unprecedented information about present and past plant-environment interactions in high resolution. Among the leading tools for quantifying xylem cell anatomical features is ROXAS (www.wsl.ch/roxas). ROXAS is written in Visual Basic 6.0 and depends on the image-analysis software Image-Pro Plus as a workhorse for general functionality. Both are approaching the end of their life cycles and are increasingly becoming a bottleneck. The aim of this project is to replace the current workhorse with up-to-date open-source tools, base wood cell detection on more powerful machine learning algorithms, and migrate the Visual Basic 6.0 code to a future-oriented programming language.