Problems and Errors

• Idrisi has a database but can not manipulate the binary numbers in the VIEW Image matrix.  It only shows a portion of the binary numbers at a time as it is a very massive database.  So when you QUERY, it will give you a warning message as I mentioned it early in my methodology section.

• My transects have between 1100-1500 of  columns but when imported into Notepad as ".txt" file and then into Excel it became one column with about 1100-1500 rows.  It is a massive database.  I can manually identify the 1's then use Count in Excel.  It is very time consuming and defeats the purpose of this project - which is to use an automated system instead of a manual count.  I tried to use Macros in Excel to combine the diameters of the pixels, but Macros is not appropriate in this case.  As a result, a new program named "Java" is created to combine the 1's and to reduce the size of the database and also show the matrix of the database.

• The reclass numbers are very arbitrary as I used qualitative measurements to reclass the non pore and pore spaces in the soil slides.  I manipulated the reclass numbers about 10-20 percent and compared it to the original slide and came up with the reclass numbers.  It is hard to judge the reclass numbers as you need to define what are pores and non pores.  Pores contain some soil or contain no soil at all.  I define it as having some soil in the pores but I do not have a solid definition of pores as I did not measure the density of soil in pores. I use visual inspections to compare as closely as possible to the original slide; as a result, my percentage of active porosity will be inaccurate and will affect the end result.

• In order for me to calculate the geometric mean pore diameter, I had to manually input the transect rows of 1's into Excel from the "runout.txt" in Java as when I import Notepad into Excel, it did not convert into rows and columns as I wanted it to.  So, this is the only step that I did manually.  I did not ask Jasper to program Java to count the geometric mean pore diameters.

• I opened Idrisi View matrix image and Java "runout.txt" for one of the slide and randomly picked a few rows to double checked Idrisi and Java if both has the correct 1's in the database.  It was exactly the same number.  I also opened Idrisi View matrix image and Java "matrixout.txt" and checked a few rows randomly to make sure both has the correct 0's and 1's in the rows.  It  was the same.

• The results of Objectives # 1 and # 2 is also inaccurate as when I opened the file in Photoshop Adobe and cut off some edges from the slide to make my image look more geometric; as a result, my final result is not as accurate as it should be.

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