A specific processing of EBSD data is proposed to study the beta --> alpha texture inheritance of alpha titanium or alpha zirconium alloys. A non standard misorientation map is calculated to localise the colonies inherited from the same parent beta grain. The calculation of the parent orientation from its inherited variants detailed in previous works has been adapted to the data obtained from an automated EBSD analysis. Finally, a method to derive the orientation map of the parent beta phase from that of the a inherited phase is proposed. The resulting alpha and beta COMs are used to study some aspects of the variant selection occurring in the beta --> alpha transformation of a T40 sample. (C) 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.