TreeRipper: towards a fully automated optical tree recognition software

Unfortunately my TreeRipper program has been rejected from BMC bioinformatics for now because there are too many delegate programs that the reviewers didn't manage to install successfully. So until I manage to find time to make a makefile that can deal with the installation on multiple platforms, I have put the manuscript on Nature precedings and you can find the code at google code. I think I am the first to attempt to fully automate the conversion of a tree image into something more useful for researchers and I hope that what I have done can be built upon and improved. I have attached to the code a set of images and tree files that might be useful for training and/or benchmarking future programs.