This can be generalized to: How do I remove regions that look similar to another region from an image?
The big Image is in grayscale. I have a lot of sand in it and I need to detect features.
The Sand particles are multiple pixels big. I know where the sand in the pictures is.
It looks something like this:
I have this kind of sand (not yet in grayscale):
What I want to achieve is that all the sand becomes a single value from 0.0 to 1.0 or one with very little variation;
That way I will be able to detect the features with ease.
So basically: Take everything that looks similar to some region in the image and remove that noisy aspect from the image.
I thought maybe one could do something like:
noise + noise = noise; it looks just as noise as before.
noise + features = noise; looks more noisy than before
(that might actually be the solution, though i still wanna ask you people)
What kind of algorithms are suitable and what do you suggest?
EDIT: This is an actual Image.
I can suggest you to try template matching.
(Blurring source image with mean or Gaussian filter before further transforms may have sense, but it must not affect features to much).
Filter regions with mean value and deviation close to noise (estimate this value for sand regions). Filter size shouldn't be very big in this case, 2+ times smaller than searched features.
More sophisticated way is template matching. It's pixel-to-pixel comparison of template region (sand) with image region. If result is lower (or higher, depends on method used) than some threshold template is matched. But I think in your case it may work worse than basic filters mentioned above.
Also you can try to use Sobel's operator or some other variant of image derivatives. In order to find edges on image (your features seemed to have one while sand doesn't).
P.S. Will try to add couple of pics with described method applied to your example image little later.
For those that happen to stumble upon this.
In the end I settled for the Trainable WEKA Segmentation. I used Fiji (ImageJ) to try it out. It worked a lot better than all the others. The noise was always different so template matching didn't work well enough unfortunately.
Another one that looked promising was the Statistical Region Merging I found in Fiji under Plugins>Segmentation.
But WEKA gave the best results.
I do hope though, that I will find something faster eventually.
Related
I asked this question previously "How to extract numbers from an image" LINK and finally i made this step but there is some test cases that leads to awful outputs when i try to recognize digits .. Consider this image as an example
This image is low contrast (from my POV) i tried to adjust its contrast and the results still unacceptable .I tried also to sharp it then i applied gamma correction but the results still not fair ,so the extracted numbers doesn't recognized well by the classifier
this is the image after (sharpening + gamma)
Number 4 after separation :
Could anybody tell me what is the best ideas to solve such a problem ?
Sharpening is not always the best tool to approach a problem like this. Contrary to what the name implies, sharpening does not "recover" information to add detail and edges back into an image. Instead, sharpening is a class of operations that increase local contrast along edges.
Because your original image is highly degraded, this sharpening operation looks to be adding a lot of noise in, and generally not making anything better.
There is another class of algorithms called "deblurring" algorithms that attempt to actually reconstruct image detail through (much more complex) mathematical models. Some versions of this are blind deconvolution, regularized deconvolution, and Wiener deconvolution.
However, it is important to note that all of these methods are approximations - once image content is lost through an operation such as blurring , it can (almost) never be fully recovered. Also, these methods are generally much more complex.
The best way to handle these situations is make sure that they never happen. Ensure good focus during image capture, use a system with a resolution well suited to your task, control the lighting environment. However, when these methods do not or cannot work, image reconstruction techniques are needed.
Your image is blurred, and I suggest you try wiener deconvolution. You can assume the point spread function a Gaussian function and observe what's going on with the deconvolution process. Since you do not know the blur kernel in advance, blind deconvolution is an alternative.
We as human, could recognize these two images as same image :
In computer, it will be easy to recognize these two image if they are in the same size, so we have to make Preprocessing stage or step before recognize it, like scaling, but if we look deeply to scaling process, we will know that it's not an efficient way.
Now, could you help me to find some way to convert images into objects that doesn't deal with size or pixel location, to be input for recognition method ?
Thanks advance.
I have several ideas:
Let the image have several color thresholds. This way you get large
areas of the same color. The shapes of those areas can be traced with
curves which are math. If you do this for the larger and the smaller
one and see if the curves match.
Try to define key spots in the area. I don't know for sure how
this works but you can look up face detection algoritms. In such
an algoritm there is a math equation for how a face should look.
If you define enough object in such algorithms you can define
multiple objects in the images to see if the object match on the
same spots.
And you could see if the predator algorithm can accept images
of multiple size. If so your problem is solved.
It looks like you assume that human's brain recognize image in computationally effective way, which is rather not true. this algorithm is so complicated that we did not find it. It also takes a large part of your brain to deal with visual data.
When it comes to software there are some scale(or affine) invariant algorithms. One of such algorithms is LeNet 5 neural network.
I'm thinking of starting a project for school where I'll use genetic algorithms to optimize digital sharpening of images. I've been playing around with unsharp masking (USM) techniques in Photoshop. Basically, I want to create a software that optimizes the parameters (i.e. blur radius, types of blur, blending the image) to create the "best-fit" set of filters.
I'm sort of quickly planning this project before starting it, and I can't think of a good fitness function for the 'selection' part. How would I determine the 'quality' of the filter sets, or measure how sharp the image is?
Also, I will be programming using python (with the Python Imaging Library) since it's the only language I'm proficient with. Should I learn a low-level language instead?
Any advice/tips on anything is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
tl;dr How do I measure how 'sharp' an image is?
if its for tuning parameters you could take a known image and apply a known blurring/low pass filter. Then sharpen this with your GA+USM algorithm. Calculate your fitness function making use of the original image, e.g maybe something as simple as the mean absolute error. May need to create different datasets, e.g. landscape images (mostly sharp, in focus with large depth of field), portrait images (could be large areas deliberately out of focus and "soft"), along with low noise and noisy images. Sharpening noisy images is actually quite a challenge.
It would definitely be worth taking a look at Bruce Frasier' work on sharpening techniques for Photoshop etc.
Also it might worth checking out Imatest (www.imatest.com) to see if there is anything regarding sharpness/resolution. And finally you might also consider resolution charts.
And finally I seroiusly doubt one set of ideal parameters exists for USM, the optimum parameters will be image dependant and indeed be a personal perference (thatwhy I suggest starting for a known sharp image and blurring it). Understanding the type of image is probably as important and in itself and very interesting and challenging problem. Although perhaps basic hueristics like image varinance and edge histogram would reveal suitable clues.
Anyway just a thought, hopefully some of the above is useful
For my final year project i'l be taking the photographs from the mobile phone and then will be computing the image processing steps. I will the taking the images under various illumination conditions (natural light, poor lightning conditions and so on). Does any one knows any algorithm that I can use to compute it?
Thanks a lot
Good whitebalancing is still an active field of research I guess. From your question, it is hard to tell how "advanced" the sought solution is supposed to be and what you need exactly.
In some other context, I recently encountered this paper. They have a quite complicated approach for Whitebalancing and produce good results:
Hsu, Mertens, Paris, Avidan, Durand. "Light mixture estimation for spatially varying white balance". In: ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2008
Check the related work section for more hints, as usual.
If you are less interested in whitebalancing but rather require to process the images further (sounds a bit like that in your comment), you should possibly aim for techniques that are rather invariant to illumination - or at least robust against changes in illumination. E.g. transforming your image in any colorspace that separates the brightness/luminance (i.e. YUV, HSV) might help, depending on your actual problem. From my experience and intuition, I would suggest that in most cases it is better to make your "recognition"-algorithm robust agains changes in illumination - rather than correcting the illumination first.
One very simple method is to take the mean pixel value of an image, adjust the exposure, take another picture and compute the mean again, continuing until the mean reaches some arbitrary value.
Try the simplest method: histogram equalization first.
Algorithm for a drawing and painting robot -
Hello
I want to write a piece of software which analyses an image, and then produces an image which captures what a human eye perceives in the original image, using a minimum of bezier path objects of varying of colour and opacity.
Unlike the recent twitter super compression contest (see: stackoverflow.com/questions/891643/twitter-image-encoding-challenge), my goal is not to create a replica which is faithful to the image, but instead to replicate the human experience of looking at the image.
As an example, if the original image shows a red balloon in the top left corner, and the reproduction has something that looks like a red balloon in the top left corner then I will have achieved my goal, even if the balloon in the reproduction is not quite in the same position and not quite the same size or colour.
When I say "as perceived by a human", I mean this in a very limited sense. i am not attempting to analyse the meaning of an image, I don't need to know what an image is of, i am only interested in the key visual features a human eye would notice, to the extent that this can be automated by an algorithm which has no capacity to conceptualise what it is actually observing.
Why this unusual criteria of human perception over photographic accuracy?
This software would be used to drive a drawing and painting robot, which will be collaborating with a human artist (see: video.google.com/videosearch?q=mr%20squiggle).
Rather than treating marks made by the human which are not photographically perfect as necessarily being mistakes, The algorithm should seek to incorporate what is already on the canvas into the final image.
So relative brightness, hue, saturation, size and position are much more important than being photographically identical to the original. The maintaining the topology of the features, block of colour, gradients, convex and concave curve will be more important the exact size shape and colour of those features
Still with me?
My problem is that I suffering a little from the "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail" syndrome. To me it seems the way to do this is using a genetic algorithm with something like the comparison of wavelet transforms (see: grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/query/) used by retrievr (see: labs.systemone.at/retrievr/) to select fit solutions.
But the main reason I see this as the answer, is that these are these are the techniques I know, there are probably much more elegant solutions using techniques I don't now anything about.
It would be especially interesting to take into account the ways the human vision system analyses an image, so perhaps special attention needs to be paid to straight lines, and angles, high contrast borders and large blocks of similar colours.
Do you have any suggestions for things I should read on vision, image algorithms, genetic algorithms or similar projects?
Thank you
Mat
PS. Some of the spelling above may appear wrong to you and your spellcheck. It's just international spelling variations which may differ from the standard in your country: e.g. Australian standard: colour vs American standard: color
There is an model that can implemented as an algorithm to calculate a saliency map for an image, determining which parts of the image would get the most attention from a human.
The model is called itti koch model
You can find a startin paper here
And more resources and c++ sourcecode here
I cannot answer your question directly, but you should really take a look at artist/programmer (Lisp) Harold Cohen's painting machine Aaron.
That's quite a big task. You might be interested in image vectorizing (don't know what it's called officially), which is used to take in rasterized images (such as pictures you take with a camera) and outputs a set of bezier lines (i think) that approximate the image you put in. Since good algorithms often output very high quality (read: complex) line sets you'd also be interested in simplification algorithms which can help enormously.
Unfortunately I am not next to my library, or I could reccomend a number of books on perceptual psychology.
The first thing you must consider is the physiology of the human eye is such that when we examine an image or scene, we are only capturing very small bits at a time, as our eyes dart around rapidly. Our mind peices the different parts together to try and form a whole.
You might start by finding an algorithm for the path of an eyeball as it darts around. Perhaps it is attracted to contrast?
Next is that our eyes adjust the "exposure" depending on the context. It's like those high dynamic range images, if they were peiced together not by multiple exposures of a whole scene, but by many small images, each balanced on its own, but blended into its surroundings to form a high dynamic range.
Now there was a finding in a monkey brain that there is a single neuron that lights up if there's a diagonal line in the upper left of its field of vision. Similar neurons can be found for vertical lines, and horizontal lines in various areas of that monkey's field of vision. The "diagonalness" determines the frequency with which that neuron fires.
one might speculated that other neurons might be found and mapped to other qualities such as redness, or texturedness, and other things.
There's something humans can do that I've not seen a computer program ever able to do. it's something called "closure", where a human is able to fill in information about something that they are seeing, that doesn't actually exist in the image. an example:
*
* *
is that a triangle? If you knew that it was in advance, then you could probably make a program to connect the dots. But what if it's just dots? How can you know? I wouldn't attempt this one unless I had some really clever way of dealing with that one.
There are many other facts about human perception you might be able to use. Good luck, you've not picked a straightforward task.
i think a thing that could help you in this enormous task is human involvement. i mean data. like you could have many people sitting staring at random dots (like from the previous post) and connect them as they see right. you could harness that data.