Directional variance analysis of annual rings

The wood quality measurement methods are of increasing importance in the wood industry. The goal is to produce more high quality products with higher marketing value than is produced today. One of the key factors for increasing the market value is to provide better measurements for increased information to support the decisions made later in the product chain. Strength and stiffness are important properties of the wood. They are related to mean annual ring width and its deviation. These indicators can be estimated from images taken from the log ends by two-dimensional power spectrum analysis. The spectrum analysis has been used successfully for images of pine. However, the annual rings in birch, for example are less distinguishable and the basic spectrum analysis method does not give reliable results. A novel method for local log end variance analysis based on Radon-transform is proposed. The directions and the positions of the annual rings can be estimated from local minimum and maximum variance estimates. Applying the spectrum analysis on the maximum local variance estimate instead of the original image produces more reliable estimate of the annual ring width. The proposed method is not limited to log end analysis only. It is usable in other two-dimensional random signal and texture analysis tasks.