I know some biologist that are taking curvature measurements on photos with softwares to understand the variation on beak morphology.
I'm wondering if there is a way to build a mechanical tool (or if one exist already) to measure the curvature of a circle's (or ellipse) arc. The arc is not always of the same length, so it would need to be adjustable.
There is a constrain (see the grey line):
I can't fit a big calliper on the bird's head.
I want to know:
- the radius of the circle that correspond to the beak curvature
- how "steep" is that curvature (probably a lack of vocabulary on my side but see the image down to see what I mean by "steep")
You can see this image as the different birds in the image above. Bird #4 would have a flatter beak than bird #1.
I need to be able to calculate the "steepness" even if the x, y or z are not of the same length.
The idea of bringing a mechanical tool is to calculate rapidly and conveniently a number and add it directly to a dataset. It's much faster than to look at photos and analyse with a software. So if there is a mechanical tool designed for this, it would be super useful.
Again, the image is just a visualization of the problem. I would like to measure the beak of different birds on the field.