I am trying to find different approaches for how to find edges in a pixelated image such as this one:
By edges I mean the clear lines that are showing from the pixels(blocks), not the edges from skin to background etc.
Does anyone got a tips for how to find these edges?
Would a Sobel filter be able to detect these lines as edges?
I have not tested anything yet, I am more looking into options on what type of filters exist.
I will be implementing the stuff in C++ and DirectX12.
There is a large selection of filters.
Result of MATLAB edge function applying different types of filters:
I looks like 'Canny' and 'approxcanny' gives the best result.
According to MATLAB documentation:
The 'Canny' and 'approxcanny' methods are not supported on a GPU.
It probably means that 'Canny' filter is less fitted for GPU implementation.
Here is the MATLAB code:
I = imread('images.jpg'); %Read image.
I = rgb2gray(I); %Convert RGB to Grayscale.
%Name of filters.
filt_name = {'sobel', 'Prewitt', 'Roberts', 'log', 'zerocross', 'Canny', 'approxcanny'};
%Display filtered images
figure('Position', [100, 100, size(I,2)*4, size(I,1)*4]);
for i = 1:length(filt_name)
%Filter I using edge detection filtes of type 'sobel', 'Prewitt', 'Roberts'...
%Use default MATLAB parameters for each filter.
J = edge(I, filt_name{i});
subplot(3, 3, i);
image(im2uint8(J));
colormap('gray');
title(filt_name{i});
axis image;axis off
end
I'm trying to use simple blob detector as described here, however a simplest possible code I've hacked does not seem to yield any results:
img = cv2.imread("detect.png")
detector = cv2.SimpleBlobDetector_create()
keypoints = detector.detect(img)
This code yields empty keypoints array:
[]
The image I'm trying to detects the blobs in is:
I would expect at least 2 blobs to be detected -- according to the documentation simpleblobdetector detects dark blobs and the image does contain 2 of those.
I know it is probably something embarassingly simple I'm missing here, but I cant seem to figure out what it is. My wild guess is, that it has to do something with the circularity of the blob, but trying all kinds of filter parameters I can't seem to figure out the right circularity parameters.
Update:
As per the comment below, where it has been suggested that I should invert my image, despite what the documentations suggests (unless I'm misreading it), I've tried to invert it and run the sample again:
img = cv2.imread("detect.png")
img = cv2.bitwise_not(img)
detector = cv2.SimpleBlobDetector_create()
keypoints = detector.detect(img)
However, as I suspected this gives the same results - no detections:
[]
The problem is the parameters :) and for the bottom blob is too close to the border...
You can take a look to the default parameters in this github link. And an interesting graph at the end of this link where you can check how the different parameters will influence the result.
Basically you can see that by default it is filtered by inertia, area and convexity. Now, if you remove the convexity and inertia filters, it will mark the top one. If you remove the area filter, still it will show only the top blob... The main issue with the bottom one is that it is too close to the border... and seems not to be a "blob" for the detector... but if add a small border to the image, it will appear. Here is the code I used for it:
import cv2
import numpy as np
img = cv2.imread('blob.png');
# create the small border around the image, just bottom
img=cv2.copyMakeBorder(img, top=0, bottom=1, left=0, right=0, borderType= cv2.BORDER_CONSTANT, value=[255,255,255] )
# create the params and deactivate the 3 filters
params = cv2.SimpleBlobDetector_Params()
params.filterByArea = False
params.filterByInertia = False
params.filterByConvexity = False
# detect the blobs
detector = cv2.SimpleBlobDetector_create(params)
keypoints = detector.detect(img)
# display them
img_with_keypoints = cv2.drawKeypoints(img, keypoints, outImage=np.array([]), color=(0, 0, 255),flags=cv2.DRAW_MATCHES_FLAGS_DRAW_RICH_KEYPOINTS)
cv2.imshow("Frame", img_with_keypoints)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()
and the resulting image:
And yes, you can achieve similar results without deactivating the filters but rather changing the parameters of it. For example, these parameters worked with exactly the same result:
params = cv2.SimpleBlobDetector_Params()
params.maxArea = 100000
params.minInertiaRatio = 0.05
params.minConvexity = .60
detector = cv2.SimpleBlobDetector_create(params)
It will heavily depend on the task at hand, and what are you looking to detect. And then play with the min/max values of each filter.
I tryed to apply to the image the following code in octave:
sq = imread("Square BW.jpg");
figure(1), imshow(Square);
cont1 = edge(sq,"Sobel");
figure(2), imshow(cont1);
The image I get is:
And a similar image appears if I use the Prewitt function. Can anyone explain to me what is happening? The problem is that I can't visualize the process only the result, so I can't understand why the code isn't working.
The problem seems to be how threshold is computed in Octave. You can see how Octave does it by looking at its source by entering type edge at the Octave prompt, or online (I'm not copying the exact code since the code is GPL -- although quite simple)
To get the border, you will need to set the threshold yourself (hopefully, in future versions of Octave's image package this will be fixed but at the moment it's Matlab incompatible since Matlab documentation on their default is unclear).
There's definitely a problem with the way the threshold is computed, however I wasn't able to find the correct value to use in this picture. After many attempts I found this code that seems to work perfectly:
sq = imread("Square BW.jpg");
maskSobel = fspecial("sobel");
mSobel = uint8(zeros(size(BW)));
for i = 0:3
mSobel += imfilter(sq, rot90(maskSobel, i));
end
figure(1), imshow(mSobel);
First we create the Sobel matrix/operator and a zero matrix the same size of the image Square BW. Then we rotate the Sobel matrix four times (by 90 degrees), in order filter the image in all directions (left-right, up-down, right-left and down-up), always adding the result to the mSobel matrix that was created.
Here's the final result:
I'm working on a project with EmguCV (.NET-version of OpenCV) and I'm using the probabilistic Hough Transformation to find lines.
So at first I was performing the canny-operator. Afterwards doing the Hough-transformation.
Gray cannyThreshold = new Gray(50);
Gray cannyThresholdLinking = new Gray(300);
Image<Gray, Byte> cannyEdges = gray.Canny(cannyThreshold, cannyThresholdLinking);
LineSegment2D[] linesFound_temporary = cannyEdges.HoughLines
(
cannyThreshold, // 1. Parameter
cannyThresholdLinking, // 2. Parameter
1, // 3. Parameter
Math.PI / 360.0, // 4. Parameter
gray.Width * 0.2, // 5. Parameter
gray.Width * 0.4, // 6. Parameter
gray.Width * 0.1 // 7. Parameter
)[0];
Later I realised that the HoughLines-Method already integrated the canny edge detection.
Nevertheless, my results in line-detection are better and more steady when I use the additional canny detection instead of leaving it out.
Can anyone explain to me, why this happens? Or has anyone experienced the same?
I experienced the same while doing one of my project. I think it dépends on the parameter given to both function. If the first canny remove too much information and no lines, the second function will suck. If you do a "first pass", removing much of the information but leaving very apparent lines, then the Hough Line has little to do. But I discovered that by tweaking the parameter of the Hough Line in the first time could achieve almost the same result.
Hope it helps!
I am working on some leaf images using OpenCV (Java). The leaves are captured on a white paper and some has shadows like this one:
Of course, it's somehow the extreme case (there are milder shadows).
Now, I want to threshold the leaf and also remove the shadow (while reserving the leaf's details).
My current flow is this:
1) Converting to HSV and extracting the Saturation channel:
Imgproc.cvtColor(colorMat, colorMat, Imgproc.COLOR_RGB2HSV);
ArrayList<Mat> channels = new ArrayList<Mat>();
Core.split(colorMat, channels);
satImg = channels.get(1);
2) De-noising (median) and applying adaptiveThreshold:
Imgproc.medianBlur(satImg , satImg , 11);
Imgproc.adaptiveThreshold(satImg , satImg , 255, Imgproc.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_MEAN_C, Imgproc.THRESH_BINARY, 401, -10);
And the result is this:
It looks OK, but the shadow is causing some anomalies along the left boundary. Also, I have this feeling that I am not using the white background to my benefit.
Now, I have 2 questions:
1) How can I improve the result and get rid of the shadow?
2) Can I get good results without working on saturation channel?. The reason I ask is that on most of my images, working on L channel (from HLS) gives way better results (apart from the shadow, of course).
Update: Using the Hue channel makes threshdolding better, but makes the shadow situation worse:
Update2: In some cases, the assumption that the shadow is darker than the leaf doesn't always hold. So, working on intensities won't help. I'm looking more toward a color channels approach.
I don't use opencv, instead I was trying to use matlab image processing toolbox to extract the leaf. Hopefully opencv has all the processing functions for you. Please see my result below. I did all the operations in your original image channel 3 and channel 1.
First I used your channel 3, threshold it with 100 (left top). Then I remove the regions on the border and regions with the pixel size smaller than 100, filling in the hole in the leaf, the result is shown in right top.
Next I used your channel 1, did the same thing as I did in channel 3, the result is shown in left bottom. Then I found out the connected regions (there are only two as you can see in the left bottom figure), remove the one with smaller area (shown in right bottom).
Suppose the right top image is I1, and the right bottom image is I, the leaf is extracted by implement ~I && I1. The leaf is:
Hope it helps. Thanks
I tried two different things:
1. other thresholding on the saturation channel
2. try to find two contours: shadow and leaf
I use c++ so your code snippets will look a little different.
trying otsu-thresholding instead of adaptive thresholding:
cv::threshold(hsv_imgs,mask,0,255,CV_THRESH_BINARY|CV_THRESH_OTSU);
leading to following images (just OTSU thresholding on saturation channel):
the other thing is computing gradient information (i used sobel, see oppenCV documentation), thresholding that and after an opening-operator I used findContours giving something like this, not useable yet (gradient contour approach):
I'm trying to do the same thing with photos of butterflies, but with more uneven and unpredictable backgrounds such as this. Once you've identified a good portion of the background (e.g. via thresholding, or as we do, flood filling from random points), what works well is to use the GrabCut algorithm to get all those bits you might miss on the initial pass. In python, assuming you still want to identify an initial area of background by thresholding on the saturation channel, try something like
import cv2
import numpy as np
img = cv2.imread("leaf.jpg")
sat = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2HSV)[:,:,1]
sat = cv2.medianBlur(sat, 11)
thresh = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(sat , 255, cv2.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_MEAN_C, cv2.THRESH_BINARY, 401, 10);
cv2.imwrite("thresh.jpg", thresh)
h, w = img.shape[:2]
bgdModel = np.zeros((1,65),np.float64)
fgdModel = np.zeros((1,65),np.float64)
grabcut_mask = thresh/255*3 #background should be 0, probable foreground = 3
cv2.grabCut(img, grabcut_mask,(0,0,w,h),bgdModel,fgdModel,5,cv2.GC_INIT_WITH_MASK)
grabcut_mask = np.where((grabcut_mask ==2)|(grabcut_mask ==0),0,1).astype('uint8')
cv2.imwrite("GrabCut1.jpg", img*grabcut_mask[...,None])
This actually gets rid of the shadows for you in this case, because the edge of the shadow actually has high saturation levels, so is included in the grab cut deletion. (I would post images, but don't have enough reputation)
Usually, however, you can't trust shadows to be included in the background detection. In this case you probably want to compare areas in the image with colour of the now-known background using the chromacity distortion measure proposed by Horprasert et. al. (1999) in "A Statistical Approach for Real-time Robust Background Subtraction and Shadow Detection". This measure takes account of the fact that for desaturated colours, hue is not a relevant measure.
Note that the pdf of the preprint you find online has a mistake (no + signs) in equation 6. You can use the version re-quoted in Rodriguez-Gomez et al (2012), equations 1 & 2. Or you can use my python code below:
def brightness_distortion(I, mu, sigma):
return np.sum(I*mu/sigma**2, axis=-1) / np.sum((mu/sigma)**2, axis=-1)
def chromacity_distortion(I, mu, sigma):
alpha = brightness_distortion(I, mu, sigma)[...,None]
return np.sqrt(np.sum(((I - alpha * mu)/sigma)**2, axis=-1))
You can feed the known background mean & stdev as the last two parameters of the chromacity_distortion function, and the RGB pixel image as the first parameter, which should show you that the shadow is basically the same chromacity as the background, and very different from the leaf. In the code below, I've then thresholded on chromacity, and done another grabcut pass. This works to remove the shadow even if the first grabcut pass doesn't (e.g. if you originally thresholded on hue)
mean, stdev = cv2.meanStdDev(img, mask = 255-thresh)
mean = mean.ravel() #bizarrely, meanStdDev returns an array of size [3,1], not [3], so flatten it
stdev = stdev.ravel()
chrom = chromacity_distortion(img, mean, stdev)
chrom255 = cv2.normalize(chrom, alpha=0, beta=255, norm_type=cv2.NORM_MINMAX).astype(np.uint8)[:,:,None]
cv2.imwrite("ChromacityDistortionFromBackground.jpg", chrom255)
thresh2 = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(chrom255 , 255, cv2.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_MEAN_C, cv2.THRESH_BINARY, 401, 10);
cv2.imwrite("thresh2.jpg", thresh2)
grabcut_mask[...] = 3
grabcut_mask[thresh==0] = 0 #where thresh == 0, definitely background, set to 0
grabcut_mask[np.logical_and(thresh == 255, thresh2 == 0)] = 2 #could try setting this to 2 or 0
cv2.grabCut(img, grabcut_mask,(0,0,w,h),bgdModel,fgdModel,5,cv2.GC_INIT_WITH_MASK)
grabcut_mask = np.where((grabcut_mask ==2)|(grabcut_mask ==0),0,1).astype('uint8')
cv2.imwrite("final_leaf.jpg", grabcut_mask[...,None]*img)
I'm afraid with the parameters I tried, this still removes the stalk, though. I think that's because GrabCut thinks that it looks a similar colour to the shadows. Let me know if you find a way to keep it.