remove stripe pattern in image taken by microscope - opencv

This picture is taken by a microscope.
I want to remove the stripes on it. I have tried DFT but it seems these stripes isn't sharp on spectrum domain.
Any advice?

Answer 1: Remove stripe directly from FFT
When I compute the FFT and we got the following image where we can see the stripe signature (I surrounded it in black).
If I remove it by hand I got that:
We can do better be removing only frequency arroud each maximum in cardinal sine.
Answer 2: Segment stripe
process : FFT -> select stripe frequency -> iFFT -> Threshold
The resulting mask contain your stripe. You can substract them from origin image, fill them etc ...
FFT with only stripe :
The resulting mask :
Answer 3: Change Capture process
It seem this stripe come from interference between your microscope slide and your cover slip. You can probably remove it by changing you process.

Solution 1:
Because you only have 3 dominant colors in the image and the stripes color is different from the other objects color, you will probably get the best result by using the objects color and doing a segmentation based on it, for instance using kmeans with k=3 then replace all the pixels that belongs to the darkest cluster with the mean value of the lightest cluster.
Solution 2:
Use hough lines to detect lines in the image,
Find the lightest color in the image,
Draw the lines detected with the lightest color.
Both solutions can be implemented in OpenCV.
Good luck!

Thanks for all the helps above!After some experiment I have implement a method that I assume works well.
Use Fourier first,than apply a filter called tophat to the magnitude image.Than the bright dots will be selected.After remove it from frequency domain, than inverse fft,the stripes will be removed.Then the image need to be filtered to extract the foreground alone.I use Gaussian filter,it works but not perfect.It seems some structure extraction filter exist,such as Relative Total Variation,I'm not sure,if someone have a better idea please tell me.
The image is like thisAfter ifft
Again thanks #Erwan and #Dr.Haimovitz for all the help.

Related

Recognition and counting of books from side using OpenCV

Just wish to receive some ideas on I can solve this problem.
For a clearer picture, here are examples of some of the image that we are looking at:
I have tried looking into thresholding it, like otsu, blobbing it, etc. However, I am still unable to segment out the books and count them properly. Hardcover is easy of course, as the cover clearly separates the books, but when it comes to softcover, I have not been able to successfully count the number of books.
Does anybody have any suggestions on what I can do? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
I ran a sobel edge detector and used Hough transform to detect lines on the last image and it seemed to be working okay for me. You can then link the edges on the output of the sobel edge detector and then count the number of horizontal lines. Or, you can do the same on the output of the lines detected using Hough.
You can further narrow down the area of interest by converting the image into a binary image. The outputs of all of these operators can be seen in following figure ( I couldn't upload an image so had to host it here) http://www.pictureshoster.com/files/v34h8hvvv1no4x13ng6c.jpg
Refer to http://www.mathworks.com/help/images/analyzing-images.html#f11-12512 for some more useful examples on how to do edge, line and corner detection.
Hope this helps.
I think that #audiohead's recommendation is good but you should be careful when applying the Hough transform for images that will have the library's stamp as it might confuse it with another book (You can see that the letters form some break-lines that will be detected by sobel).
Consider to apply first an edge preserving smoothing algorithm such as a Bilateral Filter. When tuned correctly (setting of the Kernels) it can avoid these such of problems.
A Different Solution That Might Work (But can be slow)
Here is a different approach that is based on pixel marking strategy.
a) Based on some very dark threshold, mark all black pixels as visited.
b) While there are unvisited pixels: Pick the next unvisited pixel and apply a region-growing algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region_growing while marking its pixels with a unique number. At this stage you will need to analyse the geometric shape that this region is forming. A good criteria to detecting a book is that the region is creating some form of a rectangle where width >> height. This will detect a book and mark all its pixels to the unique number.
Once there are no more unvisited pixels, the number of unique numbers is the number of books you will have + For each pixel on your image you will now to which book does it belongs.
Do you have to keep the books this way? If you can change the books to face back side to the camera then I think you can get more information about the different colors used by different books.The lines by Hough transform or edge detection will be more prominent this way.
There exist more sophisticated methods which are much better in contour detection and segmentation, you can have a look at them here, however it is quite slow, http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/grouping/resources.html
Once you get the ultrametric contour map, you can perform some computation on them to count the number of books
I would try a completely different approach; with paperbacks, the covers are medium-dark lines whilst the rest of the (assuming white pages) are fairly white and "bloomed", so I'd try to thicken up the dark edges to make them easy to detect, then that would give the edges akin to working with hardbacks which you say you've done.
I'd try something like an erosion to thicken up the edges. This would be a nice, fast operation.

which algorithm to choose for object detection?

I am interested in detecting single object more precisely a fire extinguisher which has no inter class variability (all fire extinguisher looks same). However, The application is supposedly realtime i.e a robot is exploring the environment and whenever it sees the object of interest it should be able to detect it and give pixel coordinates of it.
My question is which algorithm will be good choice for this task?
1. Is this a classification problem and should we use features(sift/surf etc) + bow +svm?
2. some other solution (no idea yet).
Any kind of input will be appreciated.
Thanks.
(P.S bear with me i am newbie to computer vision and stack over flow)
update1:
Height varies all are mounted on the wall but with different height. I tried with SIFT features and bow but it is expensive to extract bow descriptors in testing part. Moreover I have no idea how to locate the object(pixel coordinates) inside the image after its been classified positive.
update 2:
I finally used sift + bow + svm and am able to classify the object. But using this technique, i only get output interms of whether the object is present in the scene or not?
How can i detect the object i.e getting the bounding box or centre of the object. what is the compatible approach with the above method for achieving these results.
Thank you all.
I would suggest using color as the main feature to look for, and only try other features as needed. The fire extinguisher red is very distinctive, and should not occur too often elsewhere in an office environment. Other, more computationally expensive tests can then be performed only in regions of the right color.
Here is a good tutorial for color detection that also explains how to find good thresholds for your desired color.
I would suggest the following approach:
denoise your image with a median filter
convert the image to HSV format (Hue, Saturation, Value)
select pixels close to that particular shade of red with InRange()
Now you have a binary image image that contains only the pixels that are red.
count the number of red pixels with CountNonZero()
If that number is too small, abort
remove noise from the binary image by morphological opening / closing
find contours of all blobs in your picture with findContours or the CvBlob library
check if there are blobs of the correct width, correct height and correct width/height ratio
since your fire extinguishers are vertical cylinders, the width/height ratio will be constant from every angle. The width and height will of course vary somewhat with distance to the camera.
if the width and height do not match, abort
repeat these steps to find the black-colored part on the bottom of the extinguisher,
abort if there is no black region with correct width/height below the red region
(perhaps also repeat these steps for the metallic top and the yellow rectangle)
These tests should all be very fast. If they are too slow, you could reduce the resolution of your input images.
Depending on your environment, it is possible that this is already a robust enough test. If not, you can proceed with sift/surf feature matching, but only in a small region around the blobs with the correct color. You also do not necessarily have to do that for each frame, each n-th frame should be be enough for confirmation.
This is a old question .. but will still like to give my recommendation to use YOLO algorithm to solve this problem.
YOLO fits very well to this scenario.

Image Registration by Manual marking of corresponding points using OpenCV

I have a processed binary image of dimension 300x300. This processed image contains few object(person or vehicle).
I also have another RGB image of the same scene of dimensiion 640x480. It is taken from a different position
note : both cameras are not the same
I can detect objects to some extent in the first image using background subtraction. I want to detect corresponding objects in the 2nd image. I went through opencv functions
getAffineTransform
getPerspectiveTransform
findHomography
estimateRigidTransform
All these functions require corresponding points(coordinates) in two images
In the 1st binary image, I have only the information that an object is present,it does not have features exactly similar to second image(RGB).
I thought conventional feature matching to determine corresponding control points which could be used to estimate the transformation parameters is not feasible because I think I cannot determine and match features from binary and RGB image(am I right??).
If I am wrong, what features could I take, how should I proceed with Feature matching, find corresponding points, estimate the transformation parameters.
The solution which I tried more of Manual marking to estimate transformation parameters(please correct me if I am wrong)
Note : There is no movement of both cameras.
Manually marked rectangles around objects in processed image(binary)
Noted down the coordinates of the rectangles
Manually marked rectangles around objects in 2nd RGB image
Noted down the coordinates of the rectangles
Repeated above steps for different samples of 1st binary and 2nd RGB images
Now that I have some 20 corresponding points, I used them in the function as :
findHomography(src_pts, dst_pts, 0) ;
So once I detect an object in 1st image,
I drew a bounding box around it,
Transform the coordinates of the vertices using the above found transformation,
finally draw a box in 2nd RGB image with transformed coordinates as vertices.
But this doesnt mark the box in 2nd RGB image exactly over the person/object. Instead it is drawn somewhere else. Though I take several sample images of binary and RGB and use several corresponding points to estimate the transformation parameters, it seems that they are not accurate enough..
What are the meaning of CV_RANSAC and CV_LMEDS option, ransacReprojecThreshold and how to use them?
Is my approach good...what should I modify/do to make the registration accurate?
Any alternative approach to be used?
I'm fairly new to OpenCV myself, but my suggestions would be:
Seeing as you have the objects identified in the first image, I shouldn't think it would be hard to get keypoints and extract features? (or maybe you have this already?)
Identify features in the 2nd image
Match the features using OpenCV FlannBasedMatcher or similar
Highlight matching features in 2nd image or whatever you want to do.
I'd hope that because all your features in the first image should be positives (you know they are the features you want), then it'll be relatively straight forward to get accurate matches.
Like I said, I'm new to this so the ideas may need some elaboration.
It might be a little late to answer this and the asker might not see this, but if the 1st image is originally a grayscale then this could be done:
1.) 2nd image ----> grayscale ------> gray2ndimg
2.) Point to Point correspondences b/w gray1stimg and gray2ndimg by matching features.

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.

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