Image Acquisition and Parameter Calculations for Optimization of the Automatic Identification of Terpenes in a Combined Laser Thin Film Extract

In this work, we propose an original approach to the thin-layer identification of secondary metabolites (terpenes) based on the acquisition of multicomponent images integrating terpenes to be identified. Its principle consists initially of segmentation by region of each component of the image based on the attribute tuples or colors of each region of the digital image. Then we proceeded to the calculations of region parameters such as standard deviation, entropy, average pixel color, eccentricity from an algorithm on the matlab software. These values allowed us to build a database. Finally, we built an algorithm for identifying secondary metabolites (terpenes) on the basis of these data. The relevance of our method of identifying or recognizing terpenes has been demonstrated compared to other methods, such as the one based on the calculation of frontal ratios which cannot discriminate between two terpenes having the same frontal ratio. The robustness of our method with respect to the identification of linalool, limonene was tested.