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
Example Image
I want to remove the lines (shown in RED color) as they are out of order. Lines shown in black color are repeating at same period (approximately). Period is not known beforehand. Is there any way of deleting non-periodic lines( shown in red color) automatically?
NOTE: Image is binary ( back & while).. lines shown in red color only for illustration.
Of course there is any way. There is almost always some way to do something.
Infortunately you have not provided any particular problem. The entire thing is too broad to be answered here.
To help you getting started: (I highly recommend you start with pen, paper and your brain)
Detect the lines -> google or think, there are many standard ways to detect lines in an image. if you don't have noise in your binary image its trivial.
find any aequidistant sets -> think
delete the rest -> think ( you know what is good so everything else has to go away)
I assume, your lines are (almost) vertical.
The following should work
turn the image to a column sum histogram
try a Fourier transformation on the signal (potentially padding the image appropriately)
pick the maximum/peak from the Fourier spectrum as your base period
If you need the lines rather than the position of the lines, generate a mask with lines at appropriate intervals (as determined by your analysis before) and apply to the image.
I am currently working on an algorithm to detect the playing area of a pool table. For this purpose, I captured an image, transformed it to grayscale, and used a Sobel operator on it. Now I want to detect the playing area as a box with 4 corners located in the 4 corners of the table.
Detecting the edges of the table is quite straightforward, however, it turns out that detecting the 4 corners is not so easy, as there are pockets in the pool table. Now I just want to fit a line to each of the side edges, and from those lines, I can compute the intersects, which are the corners for my table.
I am stuck here, because I could not yet come up with a good solution to find these lines in my image. I can see it very easily when I used the Sobel operator. But what would be a good way of detecting it and computing the position of the corners?
EDIT: I added some sample Images
Basic Image:
Grayscale Image
Sobel Filter (horizontal only)
For a general solution, there will be many sources of noise: problems with cloth around the rails, wood texture (or no texture) on the rails, varying lighting, shadows, stains on the cloth, chalk on the rails, and so on.
When color and lighting aren't dependable, and when you want to find the edges of geometric objects, then it's best to think in terms of edge pixels rather than gray/color pixels.
A while back I was thinking of making a phone-based app to save ball positions for later review, including online, so I've though a bit about this problem. Although I can provide some guidance for your current question, it occurs to me you'll run into new problems each step of the way, so I'll try to provide a more complete answer.
Convert the image to grayscale. If we can't get an algorithm to work in grayscale, we'll inevitably run into problems with color. (See below)
[TBD] Do some preprocessing to reduce noise.
Find edge points using Sobel or (if you must) Canny.
Run Hough lines detection, but with a few caveats and parameterizations as described below.
Find the lines described a keystone-shaped quadrilateral. (This will likely be the inner quadrilateral of two: one inside the rail on the bed, and the other slightly larger quadrilateral at the cloth/wood rail edge at top.)
(Optional) Use the side pockets to help determine the orientation of the quadrilateral.
Use an affine transform to map the perspective-distorted table bed to a rectangle of [thankfully] known relative dimensions. We know the bed sizes in advance, so you can remap the distorted rectangle to a proper rectangle. (We'll ignore some optical effects for now.)
Remap the color image to the perspective-corrected rectangle. You'll probably need to tweak the positions of some balls.
General notes:
Filtering by color in the general sense can be difficult. It's tempting to think of the cloth as being simply green, blue, or red (or some other color), but when you look at the actual RGB values and try to separate colors you'll begin to appreciate what a nightmare working in color can be.
Optical distortion might throw off some edges.
The far short rail may be difficult to detect, BUT you do this: find the inside lines for the two long rails, then search vertically between the two rails for the first strong horizontal-ish edge at the far side of the image. That'll be the far short rail.
Although you probably want to use your phone camera for convenience, using a Kinect camera or similar (preferably smaller) device would make the problem easier. Not only would you have both color data and 3D data, but you would eliminate some problems with lighting since the depth data wouldn't depend on visible lighting.
For your app, consider limiting the search region for rail edges to a perspective-distorted rectangle. The user might be able to adjust the search region. This could greatly simplify the processing, and could help you work around problems if the table isn't lit well (as can be the case).
If color segmentation (as suggested by #Dima) works, get the outline of the blob using contour following. Then simplify the outline to a quadrilateral (or a polygon of few sides) by the Douglas-Peucker algorithm. You should find the four table edges this way.
For more accuracy, you can refine the edge location by local search of transitions across it and perform line fitting. Then intersect the lines to get the corners.
The following answer assumes you have already found the positions of the lines in the image. This however can be done "easily" by directly looking at the pixels and seeing if they are in a "line". Usually it is easier to detect this if the image has been deskewed first as well, i.e. Rotated so the rectangle (pool table) is more like this: [] than like /=/. Then it is just a case of scanning the pixels and if there are ones of similar colour alongside it assuming a line is between them.
The code works by looping over the lines found in the image. Whenever the end points of each line falls within a tolerance on within the x and y coordinates it is marked as a corner. Once the corners are found I take the average value between them to find where the corner lies. For example:
A horizontal line ending at 10, 10 and a vertical line starting at 12, 12 will be found to be a corner if there is a tolerance of 2 or more. The corner found will be at: 11, 11
NOTE: This is just to find Top Left corners but can easily be adapted to find all of them. The reason it has been done like this is because in the application where I use it, it is faster to sort each array first into an order where relevant values will be found first, see: Why is processing a sorted array faster than an unsorted array?.
Also note that my code finds the first corner for each line which might not be applicable for you, this is mainly for performance reasons. However the code can easily be adapted to find all the corners with all the lines then either select the "more likely" corner or average through them all.
Also note my answer is written in C#.
private IEnumerable<Point> FindTopLeftCorners(IEnumerable<Line> horizontalLines, IEnumerable<Line> verticalLines)
{
List<Point> TopLeftCorners = new List<Point>();
Line[] laHorizontalLines = horizontalLines.OrderBy(l => l.StartPoint.X).ThenBy(l => l.StartPoint.Y).ToArray();
Line[] laVerticalLines = verticalLines.OrderBy(l => l.StartPoint.X).ThenBy(l => l.StartPoint.Y).ToArray();
foreach (Line verticalLine in laVerticalLines)
{
foreach (Line horizontalLine in laHorizontalLines)
{
if (verticalLine.StartPoint.X <= (horizontalLine.StartPoint.X + _nCornerTolerance) && verticalLine.StartPoint.X >= (horizontalLine.StartPoint.X - _nCornerTolerance))
{
if (horizontalLine.StartPoint.Y <= (verticalLine.StartPoint.Y + _nCornerTolerance) && horizontalLine.StartPoint.Y >= (verticalLine.StartPoint.Y - _nCornerTolerance))
{
int nX = (verticalLine.StartPoint.X + horizontalLine.StartPoint.X) / 2;
int nY = (verticalLine.StartPoint.Y + horizontalLine.StartPoint.Y) / 2;
TopLeftCorners.Add(new Point(nX, nY));
break;
}
}
}
}
return TopLeftCorners;
}
Where Line is the following class:
public class Line
{
public Point StartPoint { get; private set; }
public Point EndPoint { get; private set; }
public Line(Point startPoint, Point endPoint)
{
this.StartPoint = startPoint;
this.EndPoint = endPoint;
}
}
And _nCornerTolerance is an int of a configurable amount.
A playing area of a pool table typically has a distinctive color, like green or blue. I would try a color-based segmentation approach first. The Color Thresholder app in MATLAB gives you an easy way to try different color spaces and thresholds.
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.