Research Interests

Shape and pattern measurement, comparison, and analysis are central to my research and is spurred by the desire to understand boreal forest disturbance patterns, their residual vegetation structures, and regeneration processes. I focus on developing theoretical approaches and tools for quantifying and comparing 2D shapes and patterns and extend those to the segmentation of 3D features into morphological classes. My work contributes to the collection of tools that characterize planar shape through the tracking of specific geometric measurements along gradients of iterative inward step-wise shrinking of polygons, to assessing the porosity of raster shapes to infer fragmentation, compaction, and shape complexity.

Recently I developed a method for characterizing planar raster binary shapes by recording hyper-local configurations and then accumulating information into empirical distributions of known configuration elements. These concepts have evolved to data in the 3D domain of voxels, and my most recent work that automatically performs mathematical morphological segmentation of features. My work in this area strives to develop new tools and to disseminate them openly to support better scientific analysis of data. Intertwined in all of this work is the desire to quantify and understand uncertainty, accuracy, and the sensitivity of measurements.