imea: A Python package for extracting 2D and 3D shape measurements from images

imea is an open source Python package for extracting 2D and 3D shape measurements from images. The current version of imea enables the extraction of 53 different 2D shape measurements, covering macrodescriptors such as minimal bounding boxes, mesodescriptors such as the numbers of erosion to erase a binary image, microdescriptors such as the fractal dimension as well as statistical lengths like Feret, Martin or Nassenstein diameters. Furthermore, 13 different 3D shape measurements ranging from volume and minimal 3D bounding boxes to 3D Feret diameters and maximum dimensions can be extracted. Both 2D shapes, represented as 2D binary images, as well as 3D shapes, represented as grayscale images where the grayvalue of each pixel represents its height, can be analyzed automatically with a single function call. Extracted shape measurements are returned as a pandas dataframe and by specifying the spatial resolution of inserted images, results are automatically converted into metric units for further quantitative analysis.