This paper copes with the reconstruction of accretionary growth sequence from images of biological structures depicting concentric ring patterns. Accretionary growth shapes are modeled as the level-sets of a potential function. Given an image of a biological structure, the reconstruction of the sequence of growth shapes is stated as a variational issue derived from geometric criteria. This variational setting exploits image-based information, in terms of the orientation field of relevant image structures, which leads to an original advection term. The resolution of this variational issue is discussed. Experiments on synthetic and real data are reported to validate the proposed approach.

This paper copes with the reconstruction of accretionary morphogenesis within a given observation plane from an image depicting successive (typically seasonal or daily) growth structures. Modeling accretionary growth shapes as the level-sets of a potential function, a variational framework is derived from geometric criteria. It resorts to minimizing an energy functional involving two terms: a regularization term and a data-driven term which constrain the evolution of the shapes with respect to a growth orientation field. Experiments carried out on real data (e.g., fish otoliths) validate the proposed approach, which opens new research directions for information extraction and decoding from biological archives.