An approach of near neighbour correlation, with manual intervention, was developed for reconstructing parent austenite microstructure in a martensitic stainless steel. This was validated in a ferrite-austenite dual structure. Two hundred and twenty randomly selected austenite grains were reconstructed from the experimental EBSD (electron backscattered diffraction) measurements. From these reconstructions, martensite variant selection was quantified as the number of variants (n_V) and the variant selection index (VSI: a statistical index for the relative area fractions of the variants). For each prior austenite grain, both nV and VSI appeared to depend on the associated transformation (austenite-martensite) strain. Selection of common variants between two neighbouring austenite grains was related to the presence of 60° or Σ3 boundary in the austenite phase and corresponding minimisation of the transformation strain.