I am currently working on an endoscopic image analysis system. The main functionality will be segmentation of the bleeding area.
So far, I have the following snapshot processing plan:
The texture and geometry of bleeding vary over a very wide range, which makes it difficult to use these features for the segmentation task. Therefore, we will use color-based segmentation.
It is not very convenient to determine the color in RGB, so first we will convert the image to HSV format.
Let's manually create a dataset that includes fragments of areas with bleeding, which we use to obtain a distribution reflecting the ratio of the H and S color parameters.
The "pillars" of distributions (H,S) and (H,V) can be divided into subdomains forming clusters. At the segmentation stage, a vector of color parameters (H,S,V) is assigned to each pixel of the image and the color parameters belonging to one of the clusters of the bleeding model is checked. The bleeding area is formed from pixels whose parameters are included in one of the clusters.
So... At this stage, we may have problems with veins and other dark red objects being mistaken for bleeding.
I want to find a solution to this problem that does not use machine learning methods.So far, nothing has occurred to me except that it is possible to somehow apply morphological methods of image processing, but I am not sure about this method.
Related
I am looking for an algorithm or, even better, some library that covers background substraction from a single static image (no background model available). What whould be possible though is some kind of user input like for example https://clippingmagic.com does it.
Sadly my google fu is bad here as i cant find any papers on that topic with my limited amount of keywords.
That webpage is really impressive. If I were to try and implement something similar I would probably use k-means clustering using the CIELAB colorspace. The reason for changing the colorspace is so that colors can be represented by two points rather than 3 as a regular RGB image. This should speed up clustering. Additionally, the CIELAB color space was build for this purpose, finding "distances" (similarities) between colors and accounts for the way humans perceive color. Not just looking at the raw binary data the computer has.
But a quick overview of kmeans. For this example we will say k=2 (meaning only two clusters)
Initialize each cluster with a mean.
Go through every pixel in your image and decide which mean it is closer to, cluster 1 or 2?
Compute the new mean for your clusters after you've processed all the pixels
using the newly computed means repeat steps 2-4 until convergence (meaning the means don't change very much)
Now that would work well when the foreground image is notably different than the background. Say a red ball in a blue background, but if the colors are similar it would be more problematic. I would still stick to kmeans but have a larger number of clusters. So on that web page you can make multiple red or green selections. I would make each of these strokes a cluster, and intialize my cluster to the mean. So say I drew 3 red strokes, and 2 green ones. That means I'd have 5 groups. But somehow internally I add an extra attribute as foreground/background. So that each cluster will have a small variance, but in the end, I would only display that attribute, foreground or background. I hope that made sense.
Maybe now you have some search terms to start off with. There may be many other methods but this is the first I thought of, good luck.
EDIT
After playing with the website a bit more I see it uses spatial proximity to cluster. So say I had 2 identical red blobs on opposite sides of the image. If I only annotate the left side of the image the blob on the right side might not get detected. Kmeans wouldn't replicate this behavior since the method I described only uses the color to cluster pixels completely oblivious to their location in the image.
I don't know what tools you have at your disposal but here is a nice matlab example/tutorial on color based kmeans
My current project is to calculate the surface area of the paste covered on the cylinder.
Refer the images below. The images below are cropped from the original images taken via a phone camera.
I am thinking terms like segmentation but due to the light reflection and shadows a simple segmentation won’t work out.
Can anyone tell me how to find the surface area covered by paste on the cylinder?
First I'd simplify the problem by rectifying the perspective effect (you may need to upscale the image to not lose precision here).
Then I'd scan vertical lines across the image.
Further, you can simplify the problem by segmentation of two classes of pixels, base and painted. Make some statistical analysis to find the range for the larger region, consisting of base pixels. Probably will make use of mathematical median of all pixels.
Then you expand the color space around this representative pixel, until you find the highest color distance gap. Repeat the procedure to retrieve the painted pixels. There's other image processing routines you may have to do such as smoothing out the noise, removing outliers and background, etc.
I am working on a project that requires me to:
Look at images that contain relatively well-defined objects, e.g.
and pick out the color of n-most (it's generic, could be 1,2,3, etc...) prominent objects in some space (whether it be RGB, HSV, whatever) and return it.
I am looking into ways to segment images like this into the independent objects. Once that's done, I'm under the impression that it won't be particularly difficult to find the contours of the segments and analyze them for average or centroid color, etc...
I looked briefly into the Watershed algorithm, which seems like it could work, but I was unsure of how to generate the marker image for an indeterminate number of blobs.
What's the best way to segment such an image, and if it's using Watershed, what's the best way to generate the corresponding marker image of integers?
Check out this possible approach:
Efficient Graph-Based Image Segmentation
Pedro F. Felzenszwalb and Daniel P. Huttenlocher
Here's what it looks like on your image:
I'm not an expert but I really don't see how the Watershed algorithm can be very useful to your segmentation problem.
From my limited experience/exposure to this kind of problems, I would think that the way to go would be to try a sliding-windows approach to segmentation. Basically this entails walking the image using a window of a set size, and attempting to determine if the window encompasses background vs. an object. You will want to try different window sizes and steps.
Doing this should allow you to detect the object in the image, presuming that the images contain relatively well defined objects. You might also attempt to perform segmentation after converting the image to black and white with a certain threshold the gives good separation of background vs. objects.
Once you've identified the object(s) via the sliding window you can attempt to determine the most prominent color using one of the methods you mentioned.
UPDATE
Based on your comment, here's another potential approach that might work for you:
If you believe the objects will have mostly uniform color you might attempt to process the image to:
remove noise;
map original image to reduced color space (i.e. 256 or event 16 colors)
detect connected components based on pixel color and determine which ones are large enough
You might also benefit from re-sampling the image to lower resolution (i.e. if the image is 1024 x 768 you might reduce it to 256 x 192) to help speed up the algorithm.
The only thing left to do would be to determine which component is the background. This is where it might make sense to also attempt to do the background removal by converting to black/white with a certain threshold.
I'm trying to extract objects from scanned images. There could be a few documents on a white background, and I need to crop and rotate them automatically. This seems like a rather simple task, but I've got stuck at some point and get bad results all the time.
I've tried to:
Binarise the image and get connected components by performing morphological operations.
Perform watershed segmentation by using dilated and eroded binary images as mask components.
Apply Canny detector and fill the contours.
None of this gets me good results. If the object does't have contrast edges (i.e a piece of paper on white background), it splits into a lot of separate components. If I connect these components by applying excessive dilation, background noise also expands and everything becomes a mess.
For example, I have an image:
After applying Canny detector and filling the contours I get something like this:
As you can see, the components are not connected. They are eve too far from each other to be connected by a reasonable amount of dilation. And when I apply watershed to this mask combined with some background points, it yields very bad results.
Some images are noisy:
In this particular case I was able to obtain contour of the whole passport by Canny detector because of it's contrast edges. But threshold method doesn't work here.
If the images are always on a very light background, then you can binarize with a threshold close to the maximum possible value. After that it is a matter of correcting the binary image to get the objects, but this step will vary depending on how your other images look like.
For instance, the following image at left is what we get with a threshold at 99% of the maximum value after a gaussian filtering on the input. After removing components connected to the border and other small components, and also combining with some basic morphological tools, we get the image at right.
This may seem a bit wishy-washy but bear with me:
This looks like quite a challenging case for image processing recipes involving only edge detection, morphological operations and segmentation.
What you are not exploiting here is that you (I believe) know what your document should look like. You are currently looking at completely general solutions which do not take into account this prior knowledge. If you can get some training data then you can go all the way from simple template/patch-based matching (SSD, Normalized Cross-Correlation) to more sophisticated object detection techniques to find the position and rotation of your documents.
My guess is that if your objects are always more or less the same and at the same scale (e.g. passports scanned at a fixed resolution/similar machines) then you can get away with a fairly crude approach. There won't be any one correct method. It's also likely that the technique you end up using will not work until you have done a significant amount of parameter tweaking, so don't give up on anything too quickly.
Iam a beginner in image mining. I would like to know the minimum dimension required for effective classification of textured images. As what i feel if a image is too small feature extraction step will not extract enough features. And if the image size goes beyond a certain dimension the processing time will increase exponentially with image size.
This is a complex question that requires a bit of thinking.
Short answer: It depends.
Long answer: It depends on the type of texture you want to classify and the type of feature your classification is based on. If the feature extracted is, say, color only, you can use "texture" as small as 1x1 pixel (in that case, using the word "texture" is a bit of an abuse). If you want to classify, say for example characters, you can usually extract a lot of local information from edges (Hough transform, Gabor filters, etc). The image plane just have to be big enough to hold the characters (say 16x16 pixels for Latin alphabet).
If you want to be able to classify any kind of images in any kind of number, you can also base your classification on global information, like entropy, correlogram, energy, inertia, cluster shade, cluster prominence, color and correlation. Those features are used for content based image retrieval.
From the top of my head, I would try using texture as small as 32x32 pixels if the kind of texture you are using is a priori unknown. If on the contrary the kind of texture is a priori known, I would choose one or more feature that I know would classify the images according to my needs (1x1 pixel for color-only, 16x16 pixels for characters, etc). Again, it really depends on what you are trying to achieve. There isn't a unique answer to your question.