Image segmentation of bubbles in poor lighting image - openCV - opencv

I am trying to determine the size of the bubbles in this picture:
Normally I achieve this readily through a thresholding, maker-based watershed segmentation, and regionprops using openCV, however with these pictures, the lighting is much worse and thus my methodology is not working.
Normally, I would apply a local threshold, fill the open holes on the bubbles (the reflection of the light) to create the bubble "area", then segment using watershed.
However, now, no matter what I try, I can not get a good threshold - as the bubbles do not form closed circles, I can not get the bubble "area" to segment, shown here:
I have tried Canny edge detection, Otsu thresholding, different levels of threshold, nothing is working for me.
Does anyone have any advice on how I would go about segmenting this image?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
I am trying to determine the bubble size distriubtion of this image, using image segmentation.

Related

Detect missing squares in color calibration chart opencv python

I am am currently working on a method to extract colors from a macbeth color chart. So far I have had moderate success by using thresholding and then extracting square contours. Sadly through, colors that are too close to each other either mix together or do no get detected.
The code in it's current form:
<script src="https://pastebin.com/embed_js/mNi0TcDE"></script>
The image before any processing
After thresholding, you can see that there are areas where lines are incomplete due to too small differences in color. I have tried to use dilation to midigate these issues and it does work to a degree. But not enough to detect all squares.
Image after thresholding
This results in the following contours being detected
Detected contours
I have tried using:
Hough lines, sadly no lines here detected.
Centroids of contours, but I was unable to find a way to use centroids to draw lines and detect the centers of the missing contours
Corner detection, corners where found. But I was unsuccessful in finding a real way to put them to use.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Thaks in advance,
Emil
Hum, if your goal is color calibration, you really do not need to detect the squares in their entirety. A 10x10 sample near the center of the image of each physical square will give you 100 color samples, which is plenty for any reasonable calibration procedure.
There are many ways to approach this problem. If you can guarantee that the chart will cover the image, you could even just do k-means clustering, since you know in advance the exact number of clusters you seek.
If you insist on using geometry, I'd do template matching in scale+angle space - it is reasonable to assume that the chart will be mostly facing, and only slightly rotated, so you only need to estimate scale and a small rotation about the axis orthogonal to the chart.

Finding the Bounding area of hand

I have the image of hand that was detected using this link. Its hand detection using HSV color space.
Now I face a problem: I need to get the enclosing area/draw bounding lines possible enough to determine the hand area, then fill the enclosing area and subtract it from the original to remove the hand.
I have thus so far tried to blurring the image to reduce noise, dilating the image, closing holes, etc. that seem to be an overdose. I have tried contours, and that seem to be the best approach so far. I was trying to get the convex hull (largest) and I ended up with the following after testing with different thresholds.
The inaccuracies can be seen with the thumb were the hull straightens. It must be curved. I am trying to figure out the location of the hand so to identify the region being covered by the hand. Going to subtract it to remove the hand from the original image. That is what I want to achieve.
Is there a better approach to this?
And ideas suggestions greatly appreciated.
Original and detected are as follows
Instead of the convex hull, consider using the alpha hull, which can better follow the contours of a shape by allowing concavities.
This site has a nice summary of alpha shapes: "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Alpha Shapes But Were Afraid to Ask" by François Bélair.
http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/teaching/projects97/belair/alpha.html
As David mentioned in his post, consider thresholding using HSV (or HSI) color space rather than on RGB or grayscale. If you can allow for longer processing time, you can use an algorithm such as Mean Shift to segment trickier images like yours. OpenCV has an implementation of Mean Shift, and the book Learning OpenCV provides a concise description of the algorithm.
Image Segmentation using Mean Shift explained
In any case, a standard binarization threshold doesn't appear to be helping much. Consider using a dynamic threshold; at least local/dynamic threshold is implemented for contours in OpenCV, from what I recall.
Assuming you want to identify hand area instead of the area convex hull gives and background of the application is at least in same color, I would apply hsv-threshold to identify background instead of hand if possible. Or maybe adaptive threshold if light distribution is not consistent. I believe this is what many applications do
If background can't be fixed, the segmentation is not an easy problem to resolve as you should take care of shadows and palm lines.

square detection, image processing

I am looking for an efficient way to detect the small boxes around the numbers (see images)?
I already tried to use hough transformation with no success. Any ideas? I need some hints! I am using opencv...
For inspiration, you can have a look at the
Matlab video sudoku solver demo and explanation
Sudoku Grab, an Iphone App, whose author explains the computer vision part on his blog
Alternatively, if you are always hunting for the same grid you could deploy something like this:
Make a perfect artificial template of the grid and detect or save all coordinates from all corners.
In the target image, do the same thing, for example with Harris points. Be creative, you might also be able to use the distinct triangles that can be found in your images.
Using the coordinates from the template and the found harris points, determine the affine transformation x = Ax' between the template and the target image. That transformation can then be used to map the template grid onto the target image. At the very least this will give you some prior information to help guide further segmentation.
The gist of the idea and examples of the estimation of affine matrix A can be found on the site of Zissermans book Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision and Peter Kovesi
I'd start by trying to detect the rectangular boundary of the overall sheet, then applying a perspective transform to make it truly rectangular. Crop that portion of the image out. If possible, then try to make the alternating white and grey sub-rectangles have an equal background brightness - maybe try adaptive histogram equalization.
Then the Hough transform might perform better. Alternatively, you could then take an approach that's broadly similar to this demonstration by Robert Bemis on MATLAB Central (it's analysing a DNA microarray image rather than Lotto cards, but it's essentially finding bounding boxes of items arranged in a grid). At a high level, the approach is to calculate the autocorrelation along columns and rows of pixels to detect the periodicity of the items in the grid, and use that to impose a bounding box on each item.
Sorry the above advice is mostly MATLAB-based; I'm afraid I'm not an opencv user, but hopefully it will give you some ideas at least.

Finding a grid in an image

Having a match-3 game screenshot (for example http://www.gameplay3.com/images/games/jewel-quest-ii-01S.jpg), what would be the correct way to find the bound box for the grid (table with tiles)? The board doesn't have to be a perfect rectangle (as can be seen in the screenshot), but each cell is completely square.
I've tried several games, and found that there are some per-game image transformations that can be done to enhance the tiles inside the grid (for example in this game it's enough to take the V channel out of HSV color space). Then I can enlarge the tiles so that they overlap, find the largest contour of the image and get the bound box from it.
The problem with above approach is that every game (or even level inside the same game) may need a different transformation to get hold of the tiles. So the question is - is there a standard way to enhance either tiles inside the grid or grid's lines (I've tried finding lines with Hough transform, but, although the grid seems pretty visible to the eye, Hough doesn't find it)?
Also, what if the screenshot is obtained using the phone camera instead of taking a screenshot of a desktop? From my experience, captured images have less defined colors (which depends on lighting), and also can be distorted a little, as there is no way to hold the phone exactly in front of the screen.
I would go with the following approach for a screenshot:
Find corners in the image using for example a canny like edge detector.
Perform a hough line transform. This should work quite nicely on the edge image.
If you have some information about size of the tiles you could eliminate false positive lines using some sort of spatial model of the grid (eg. lines only having a small angle to x/y axis of the image and/or distance/angle of tile borders.
Identifiy tile borders under the found hough lines by looking for edges found by canny under/next to the lines.
Which implementation of the hough transform did you use? How did you preprocess the image?
Another approach would be to use some sort of machine learning approach. As you are working in OpenCV you could use either a Haar like feature detector. An example for face detection using Haar like features can be found here:
OpenCV Haar Face Detector example
Another machine learning approach would be to follow a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (Hog) approach in combination with a Support Vector Machine (SVM). An example is located here:
HOG example
You can find general information about HoG detection at:
Hog detection

OpenCV floor detection by segmentation

I'm working on a way to detect the floor in an image. I'm trying to accomplish this by reducing the image to areas of color and then assuming that the largest area is the floor. (We get to make some pretty extensive assumptions about the environment the robot will operate in)
What I'm looking for is some recommendations on algorithms that would be suited to this problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Edit: specifically I am looking for an image segmentation algorithm that can reliably extract one area. Everything I've tried (mainly PyrSegmentation) seems to work by reducing the image to N colors. This is causing false positives when the camera is looking at an empty area.
Since floor detection is the main aim, I'd say instead of segmenting by color, you could try separation by texture.
The Eigen transform paper describes a single-value descriptor of texture "roughness" using the average of eigenvalues over a grayscale window in the image/video frame. On pg. 78 of the paper they apply the mean-shift segmentation on the eigen-transform output image, effectively separating it into different textures.
Since your images are from a video feed, there can be a lot of variations in lighting so color segmentation might pose a few problems (unless you're working with HSV and other color spaces as mentioned above). The calculation of the eigenvalues is very simple and fast in OpenCV with the cvSVD() function.
If you can make the assumption about colour constancy your main issue is going to be changes in lighting that will throw off your colour detection.
To that end, convert your input image to HSV, HSL, cie-Lab, YUV or some other luminance-separated colourspace and segment your image based on just the colour part (leave out the luminance value, V, L, L and Y in the examples above). This will help you overcome the obstacle of shadows and variations in lighting.

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