ABSTRACT
The main practical purpose of stereology is to extract quantitative information from microscope images. For example, Figure 1.1 shows a microscope image of a type of rock. Stereology makes it possible to infer, from this image alone, properties of the rock such as its percentage composition, the average volume of the crystalline mineral grains, the area of grain boundary surfaces per unit volume of rock, the length of grain edges per unit volume of rock, and the mean solid angle between facets of a grain.
