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Abstract

Many plant leaves exhibit bilateral symmetry, but such symmetry has rarely been measuredbecause of the lack of practical methods. We propose a simple method for achieving the above objective. A leaf is divided into left and right sides, and several equally-sized strips are generated to intersect each side of that leaf to generate pairwise left and right sub-regions. A standardized index (SI) for measuring bilateral symmetry is built based on the left–right areal differences of those sub-regions. The leaves of 10 species of plants were sampled for testing the method’s validity. Based on the experimental data, we compared the root-mean-squared error (RMSE), SI, and areal ratio (AR) of the left side to the right side of the leaf. The SI measures the bilateral symmetry of plant leaves well, and it is better than the RMSE and AR for eliminating the effect of leaf size on the goodness of fit. The SI proposed here is the best indicator for evaluating the degree of bilateral symmetry and can be potentially used for comparing the difference in the bilateral symmetry of leaves of different plants.

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Shi, P and Zheng, X and Ratkowsky, DA and Li, Y and Wang, P and Cheng, L
Keywords:	leaf area, leaf size, mirror image, spatstat, standardized index
Journal or Publication Title:	Symmetry
Publisher:	MDPIAG
ISSN:	2073-8994
DOI / ID Number:	10.3390/sym10040118
Copyright Information:	Copyright 2018 The Authors. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Related URLs:	UTAS Profile: Ratkowsky, DA
Item Statistics:	View statistics for this item

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