APPARATUS AND METHOD OF GRID-ORIENTED NORMALIZATION FOR ANALYSIS OF SPHERICAL AREAS FROM 2-D IMAGE

The present invention includes a system which determines feature metrics on a spherical surface, the system disposed at a client/server, including: a grid generation engine which generates a grid according to user configuration; a feature segmentation engine which digitizes a two-dimensional image of the spherical surface containing the feature and determines a feature location in the image, a grid overlay and enumeration engine which determines a position of the grid relative to the feature and overlays the grid onto the image to determine grid cell overlap and coverage; and a feature parameterization engine which performs analysis of the covered cells to obtain the metrics of the feature for the user; where the metrics includes a total area, a centroid, moments of inertia, a perimeter, a major axis, a compactness, an orientation, an XY bounding box, a major axis bounding box, an XY aspect ratio and a major axis aspect ratio.