The isolation of carrot embryos and their measurement by machine vision for the prediction of crop uniformity

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Abstract
Summary The coefficient of variation of embryo length in carrot seed lots is a useful predictor of uniformity in the harvested roots. Methods available hitherto have involved hand dissection of seeds and measurement of embryos, a tedious and time-consuming process. This paper describes a new semi-automated technique for recovering embryos in bulk following the removal of the stylopodium by abrasion and chemical digestion with sulphuric acid and sodium hydroxide. The use of formaldehyde is avoided. Measurements and statistical calculations are made more rapidly by video-linked computer analysis of size (machine vision) followed by data analysis on the same microcomputer. Overall, the time taken to determine the coefficient of variation of embryo size is reduced by a factor of six compared with the hand method. This provides an opportunity to increase the accuracy of the method by raising the sample size from 100 to 200 embryos while retaining a more than threefold increase in speed of analysis. The automated collection, transcription and statistical analysis of data reduces the frequency of data handling errors and provides a permanent record in electronic form.