How to get the area of the contours? - opencv

Question

I have a picture like this:
And then I transform it into binary image and use canny to detect edge of the picture:
gray = cv.cvtColor(image, cv.COLOR_RGB2GRAY)
edge = Image.fromarray(edges)
And then I get the result as:
I want to get the area of 2 like this:
My solution is to use HoughLines to find lines in the picture and calculate the area of triangle formed by lines. However, this way is not precise because the closed area is not a standard triangle. How to get the area of region 2?

Answer 1

A simple approach using floodFill and countNonZero could be the following code snippet. My standard quote on contourArea from the help:
The function computes a contour area. Similarly to moments, the area is computed using the Green formula. Thus, the returned area and the number of non-zero pixels, if you draw the contour using drawContours or fillPoly, can be different. Also, the function will most certainly give a wrong results for contours with self-intersections.
Code:
import cv2
import numpy as np
# Input image
img = cv2.imread('images/YMMEE.jpg', cv2.IMREAD_GRAYSCALE)
# Needed due to JPG artifacts
_, temp = cv2.threshold(img, 128, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
# Dilate to better detect contours
temp = cv2.dilate(temp, cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (3, 3)))
# Find largest contour
cnts, _ = cv2.findContours(temp, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL , cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE)
largestCnt = []
for cnt in cnts:
if (len(cnt) > len(largestCnt)):
largestCnt = cnt
# Determine center of area of largest contour
M = cv2.moments(largestCnt)
x = int(M["m10"] / M["m00"])
y = int(M["m01"] / M["m00"])
# Initiale mask for flood filling
width, height = temp.shape
mask = img2 = np.ones((width + 2, height + 2), np.uint8) * 255
mask[1:width, 1:height] = 0
# Generate intermediate image, draw largest contour, flood filled
temp = np.zeros(temp.shape, np.uint8)
temp = cv2.drawContours(temp, largestCnt, -1, 255, cv2.FILLED)
_, temp, mask, _ = cv2.floodFill(temp, mask, (x, y), 255)
temp = cv2.morphologyEx(temp, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (3, 3)))
# Count pixels in desired region
area = cv2.countNonZero(temp)
# Put result on original image
img = cv2.putText(img, str(area), (x, y), cv2.FONT_HERSHEY_COMPLEX_SMALL, 1, 255)
cv2.imshow('Input', img)
cv2.imshow('Temp image', temp)
cv2.waitKey(0)
Temporary image:
Result image:
Caveat: findContours has some problems one the right side, where the line is very close to the bottom image border, resulting in possibly omitting some pixels.
Disclaimer: I'm new to Python in general, and specially to the Python API of OpenCV (C++ for the win). Comments, improvements, highlighting Python no-gos are highly welcome!

Answer 2

There is a very simple way to find this area, if you take some assumptions that are met in the example image:
The area to be found is bounded on top by a line
Any additional lines in the image are above the line of interest
There are no discontinuities in the line
In this case, the area of the region of interest is given by the sum of the lengths from the bottom of the image to the first set pixel. We can compute this with:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as pp
img = pp.imread('/home/cris/tmp/YMMEE.jpg')
img = np.flip(img, axis=0)
pos = np.argmax(img, axis=0)
area = np.sum(pos)
print('Area = %d\n'%area)
This prints Area = 22040.
np.argmax finds the first set pixel on each column of the image, returning the index. By first using np.flip, we flip this axis so that the first pixel is actually the one on the bottom. The index corresponds to the number of pixels between the bottom of the image and the line (not including the set pixel).
Thus, we're computing the area under the line. If you need to include the line itself in the area, add pos.shape[0] to the area (i.e. the number of columns).