TransectMeasure - single camera measurement and analysis tool

TransectMeasure is a program used for the analysis of percentage cover, and measurement of lengths and areas from digital imagery. It is widely used for the analysis of transects or biological sampling from images.

The program supports a variety of still and movie image formats (including a movie player) and allows the user to perform the following measuring functions:

• Overlay user-defined dots, grids or random dot patterns, and interactively assign up to 8 attributes to each dot. Dot patterns can be constrained to fall within a user-defined polygon within the image (typically this is a quadrat).


• Make scaled length and area measurements. TransectMeasure supports several calibration models using either quadrats or known lengths to allow scaled measurement of lengths and areas. It uses a projective transformation for quadrat calibrations, accurately modelling oblique imagery. TransectMeasure can generate virtual quadrats based on stereo measurements made in EventMeasure. Calibrations for scaled measurements can also be made using generic systems of 3 or more lasers. The length of complex objects can be easily measured using a series of points. Area measurements are based on user-defined polygons.

The software allows the user to load a predefined file of attributes and allows attributes to be defined in a dependant and/or hierarchical manner. Point, length and area attributes can be assigned and edited easily with an integrated step, zoom, and measurement history function. There are numerous shortcut key operations and the ability to 'group' edit attributes that make assigning and editing measurement attributes fast and efficient. In addition to the 8 attributes that can be assigned to point, length and area measurements, TransectMeasure has 12 user configurable information fields. These information fields are usually set up to record general survey information (depth, location, observer details, and so on).

All results for point, length and area measurements can be exported to text files, suitable for importing to spreadsheet or database software for further analysis. TransectMeasure also produces a point count report that automatically collates point measurements across multiple measurement files.

TransectMeasure supports the creation of reference images (still or movie), and provides a viewer for browsing and searching reference images.