I am currently doing post-processing of a weak and fast-moving pattern (actually waves, if you are familiar with Schlieren Imaging...)
Now the problem is that, other than by directly showing the raw images and measure by hand, I have no good ways to visualize it neatly or extract any data from it (the main point of the post-processing is to find out the frequency! Or even more ambitiously, the velocity of the wave moving...)
In a nutshell, what I have in mind about the problem is that:
The patterns are weak, hence any operation of noise removal would hurt it
The background is uneven and noisy
The patterns move too quickly: within four or five frames the patterns would pass by the whole range of image
Here are an example of images: I have selected 5 that are representative.
Image 1 of the series of image
Image 2 of the series of images
Image 3 of the series of images
Image 4 of the series of images
Image 5 of the series of images
Also, to better visualize what is moving, I have made a gif to animate them:
Animated image
Related
I am working on a project, which will intake multiple images (lets say 2 for the moment) and combine them to generate a better image. The resultant image will be a combination of those input images. As a requirement I want to achieve this by using OpenCV. I read about Image Stitching and saw some example images in the process and now I am confused whether image overlapping is equal to image stitching, or can the Stitcher class in OpenCV do Image overlapping? A little clarity as to how can I achieve the above project problem thru OpenCV.
"Image overlapping" is not really a term used in the CV literature. The general concept of matching images via transformations is most often called image registration. Image registration is taking many images and inserting them all into one shared coordinate system. Image stitching relies on that same function, but additionally concerns itself with how to blend multiple images. Furthermore, image stitching tries to take into account multiple images at once and makes small adjustments to the paired image registrations.
But it seems you're interested in producing higher quality images from multiple images of the same space (or from video feed of the space for example). The term for that is not image overlapping but super-resolution; specifically, super-resolution from multiple images. You'll want to look into specialized filters (after warping to the same coordinates) to combine those multiple views into a high resolution image. There are many papers on this topic (e.g.). Even mean or median filters (that is, taking the mean or median at every pixel location across the images) can work well, assuming your transformations are very good.
I am currently working on an animal identification using footprint recognition project. My main task is to process an animal footprint taken from natural substrate and identify the animal the footprint belongs to. The first step is to preprocess the image and extract the ROI. This is where I am having difficulty as the processed images contain a lot of noise.
I have carried out a series of preprocessing steps all of which did reduce the noise but not sufficiently. The image below shows the outcome I have achieved thus far.
In order of left to right, the first image in the top row is an example of an animal footprint that I need to classify. The second image is one example of an image that will be used to train the system and classify the animal species (in this case a bear species). The third and fourth image in the first row show the grayscale and logarithmic transformation of the test image respectively.
The first image in the bottom row is a median blur of the image, the second shows adaptive thresholding. The third image shows the result of an eight-neighbour connectivity test where any pixel missing a neighbour is removed. The fourth image shows the image when erosion is applied after dilation. The last image shows the detected contours.
I have tried working with the contours to remove contours less than a certain area but it still didn't produce a better representation of the image. Displaying the largest contour just displays the entire image.
Using connected components detects a large number because of the high level of noise. I have tried working with blob detection and again did not achieve the desired results.
Im looking for the best and most efficient way to denoise the images and extract ROI.
Sample image:
One simple and effective way is to open the binary image then close it. Opening would help you with the white dots in the center of the image and closing would fill the undesired black spots in the white areas and finally you would have a neat footprint.
I applied binary threshold and followed it with morphological closing operation.
This is what I obtained:
This is the result of binary thresholding.
This is the result of morphological closing.
You have to do further processing to extract the foot perfectly.
I would suggest applying contour now. It should work fine.
I'm working with Infra Red image that is an output of a 3D sensor. This sensors project a Infra Red pattern in order to draw a depth map, and, because of this, the IR image has a lot of white spots that reduce its quality. So, I want to process this image to make it smoother in order to make it possible to detect objects laying in the surface.
The original image looks like this:
My objective is to have something like this (which I obtained by blocking the IR projecter with my hand) :
An "open" morphological operation does remove some noise, but I think first there should be some noise removal operation that addresses the white dots.
Any ideas?
I should mention that the algorithm to reduce the noise has to run on real time.
A median filter would be my first attempt .... possibly followed by a Gaussian blur. It really depends what you want to do with it afterwards.
For example, here's your original image after a 5x5 median filter and 5x5 Gaussian blur:
The main difficulty in your images is the large radius of the white dots.
Median and morphologic filters should be of little help here.
Usually I'm not a big fan of these algorithms, but you seem to have a perfect use case for a decomposition of your images on a functional space with a sketch and an oscillatary component.
Basically, these algorithms aim at solving for the cartoon-like image X that approaches the observed image, and that differs from Y only through the removal of some oscillatory texture.
You can find a list of related papers and algorithms here.
(Disclaimer: I'm not Jérôme Gilles, but I know him, and I know that
most of his algorithms were implemented in plain C, so I think most of
them are practical to implement with OpenCV.)
What you can try otherwise, if you want to try simpler implementations first:
taking the difference between the input image and a blurred version to see if it emphasizes the dots, in which case you have an easy way to find and mark them. The output of this part may be enough, but you may also want to fill the previous place of the dots using inpainting,
or applying anisotropic diffusion (like the Rudin-Osher-Fatemi equation) to see if the dots disappear. Despite its apparent complexity, this diffusion can be implemented easily and efficiently in OpenCV by applying the algorithms in this paper. TV diffusion can also be used for the inpainting step of the previous item.
My main point on the noise removal was to have a cleaner image so it would be easier to detect objects. However, as I tried to find a solution for the problem, I realized that it was unrealistic to remove all noise from the image using on-the-fly noise removal algorithms, since most of the image is actually noise.. So I had to find the objects despite those conditions. Here is my aproach
1 - Initial image
2 - Background subtraction followed by opening operation to smooth noise
3 - Binary threshold
4 - Morphological operation close to make sure object has no edge discontinuities (necessary for thin objects)
5 - Fill holes + opening morphological operations to remove small noise blobs
6 - Detection
Is the IR projected pattern fixed or changes over time?
In the second case, you could try to take advantage of the movement of the dots.
For instance, you could acquire a sequence of images and assign each pixel of the result image to the minimum (or a very low percentile) value of the sequence.
Edit: here is a Python script you might want to try
I have two images which I know represent the exact same object. In the picture below, they are referred as Reference and Match.
The image Match can undergo the following transformations compared to Reference:
The object may have changed its appearance locally by addition(e.g. dirt or lettering added to the side) or omission (side mirror has been taken out).
Stretched or reduced in size horizontally only (it is not resized in vertical direction)
Portions of Reference image are not present in Match (shaded in red in Reference Image).
Question: How can the regions which have "changed" in the ways mentioned above be identified ?
Idea#1: Dynamic Time Warping seems like a good candidate once the beginning and end of Match image (numbered 1 and 3 in the image) are aligned with corresponding columns in Reference Image, but I am not sure how to proceed.
Idea#2: Match SIFT features across images. The tessellation produced by feature point locations breaks up the image into non-uniform tiles. Use feature correspondences across images to determine which tiles to match across images. Use a similarity measure to figure out any changes.
You might want to consider an iterative registration algorithm. Basically you want to perform optimization to find the parameters of the transform, in your case horizontal scaling and horizontal translation. Once you optimize the parameters you will have the transformation between the two images, transform one to match the other, and can then use a subtraction to identify the regions with differences.
For registration take a look at the ITK library.
You can probably do a gradient decent optimization using mutual information as the metric. It has a number of different transforms that will capture translation and scaling. The code should run quickly on the sample images you show.
I'm working on an image stitching project, and I understand there's different approaches on dealing with contrast and brightness of an image. I could of course deal with this issue before I even stitched the image, but yet the result is not as consistent as I would hope. So my question is if it's possible by any chance to "balance" or rather "equalize" the contrast and brightness in color pictures after the stitching has taken place?
You want to determine the histogram equalization function not from the entire images, but on the zone where they will touch or overlap. You obviously want to have identical histograms in the overlap area, so this is where you calculate the functions. You then apply the equalization functions that accomplish this on the entire images. If you have more than two stitches, you still want to have global equalization beforehand, and then use a weighted application of the overlap-equalizing functions that decreases the impact as you move away from the stitched edge.
Apologies if this is all obvious to you already, but your general question leads me to a general answer.
You may want to have a look at the Exposure Compensator class provided by OpenCV.
Exposure compensation is done in 3 steps:
Create your exposure compensator
Ptr<ExposureCompensator> compensator = ExposureCompensator::createDefault(expos_comp_type);
You input all of your images along with the top left corners of each of them. You can leave the masks completely white by default unless you want to specify certain parts of the image to work on.
compensator->feed(corners, images, masks);
Now it has all the information of how the images overlap, you can compensate each image individually
compensator->apply(image_index, corners[image_index], image, mask);
The compensated image will be stored in image