Iris detection in still images - opencv

I have good resolution faces images and I would like to automatically detect the iris and know its color. Is there any state-of-the-art (standard) way to detect iris other than HoughCircles which is not reporting consistent results on different images. One condition I have is that I have to use still images (no video is available)?
I am using OpenCV-Python for image processing. Any help is highly appreciated.

I think the problem can be split into two parts:
Localisation of the iris regions
Estimating the colour
Step one is time consuming, but I have done this at my workplace. You can train a Haar-cascade classifier for iris images (grayscale), and localise the iris within the eye-region returned be the cascade classifier for the eyes. If you already have a collection of face images, you can use them. Otherwise, try to collect as many samples as possible, with the same image quality as the images you want to use.
Step two is relatively easy, but might not be "very easy" because of auto white balance etc.
If you want a simpler approach, try detecting the white regions of the eye and using them to loc

Related

How to verify if the image contains noise in background before ‘OCR’ing

I have several types of images that I need to extract text from.
I can manually classify the images into 3 categories based on the noise on the background:
Images with no noise.
Images with some light noise in the background.
Heavy noise in the background.
For the category 1 images, I could apply OCR’ing fine without problems. → basic case.
For the category 2 images and some of the category 3 images, I could manage to extract the texts by applying the following methods:
Grayscale, Gaussian blur, Otsu’s threshold
Morph open to remove noise and invert the image
→ then perform text extraction.
For the OCR’ing task, one removing noise method is obviously not working for all images. So, Is there any method for classifying the level background noise of the images?
Please all suggestions are welcome.
Thanks in advance.
Following up on your comment from other question here are some things you could try. Some combinations of ideas below should help.
Image Embedding and Vector Clustering
Manual
Use a pretrained network such as resnet on imagenet (may not work good) or a simple pretrained network trained on MNIST/EMNIST.
Extract and concat some layers flattened weight vectors toward end of network. Apply dimensionality reduction and apply nearest neighbor/approximate nearest neighbor algorithms to find closest matches. Set number of clusters 3 as you have 3 types of images.
For nearest neighbor start with KNN. There are also many libraries in github that may help such as faiss, annoy etc.
More can be found from,
https://github.com/topics/nearest-neighbor-search
https://github.com/topics/approximate-nearest-neighbor-search
If result of above is not good enough try finetuning only last few layers MNIST/EMNIST trained network.
Using Existing Libraries
For grouping/finding similar images look into,
https://github.com/jina-ai/jina
You should be able to find more similarity clustering using tags neural-search, image-search on github.
https://github.com/topics/neural-search
https://github.com/topics/image-search
OCR
Try easyocr as it worked better for me than tesserect last time used ocr.
Run it first on whole document to see if requirements met.
Use not so tight cropping instead some/large padding around text if possible with no other text nearby. Another way is try padding in all direction in tight cropped text to see if it improves ocr result.
For tesserect see if tools mentioned in improving quality doc helps.
Classification
If you already have data sorted into 3 different directory and want to classify future images only then I suggest a neural network. Modify mnist or cifar example of pytorch or tensorflow to train and classify test images.
Based on sample images it looks like computer font instead of handwritten text. If that is the case Template matching at multiple scales may help. You have to see if the noise affects the matching result. Image from, https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2021/03/22/opencv-template-matching-cv2-matchtemplate/
Noise Removal
Here also you can go with a neural network. Train a denoising autoencoder with Category 1 images, corrupted type 1 images by adding noise that mimicks Category 2 and Category 3 images. This way the neural network will classify the 3 image categories without needing manually create dataset and in post processing you can use another neural network or image processing method to remove noise based on category type. Image from, https://keras.io/examples/vision/autoencoder/
Try existing libraries or pretrained networks on github to remove noise in the whole document/cropped region. Look into rembg if it works on text documents.
Your samples are not very convincing. All images binarize easily (threshold 25).

Is it a good idea to train a face classifier (Conv NN) without aligning faces?

I have a set of images of people coming into a store captured from a camera pointing at the door. I have about 100s of faces from which I have to take out all the staff faces that work at the store.
I thought of preparing a training set with staff faces and customer faces labelled separately. Is it necessary to perform face alignment before feeding the images to the CNN for training? What if we just give it the raw images. The raw images cover - the hair, neck and the whole face of the person.
Can you suggest me how I can circumvent the task of face alignment in case it is necessary?
This will work but alignment will give you better results faster. Be sure to use data augmentation that allows for translation and cropping.

Logo detection/recognition in natural images

Given a logo image as a reference image, how to detect/recognize it in a cluttered natural image?
The logo may be quite small in the image, it can appear in clothes, hats, shoes, background wall etc. I have tried SIFT feature for matching without any other preprocessing, and the result is good for cases in which the size of the logo in images is big and the logo is clear. However, it fails for some cases where the scene is quite cluttered and the proportion of the logo size is quite small compared with the whole image. It seems that SIFT feature is sensitive to perspective distortions.
Anyone know some better features or ideas for logo detection/recognition in natural images? For example, training a classifier to locate candidate regions first, and then apply directly SIFT matching for further recognition. However, training a model needs many data, especially it needs manually annotating logo regions in images, and it needs re-training (needs to collect and annotate new image) if I want to apply it for new logos.
So, any suggestions for this? Detailed workflow/code/reference will be highly appreciated, thanks!
There are many algorithms from shape matching to haar classifiers. The best algorithm very depend on kind of logo.
If you want to continue with feature registration, i recommend:
For detection of small logos, use tiles. Split whole image to smaller (overlapping) tiles and perform usual detection. It will use "locality" of searched features.
Try ASIFT for affine invariant detection.
Use many template images for reference feature extraction, with different lightning , different background images (black, white, gray)

Can Haar Cascade be too accurate to be useful in this situation?

I'm making a program to detect shapes from an r/c plane for a competition. I have no real images of the targets, but I do have computer generated examples of them on the rules.
My question is, can I train my program to detect real world objects based on computer generated shapes or should I find a different method to complete this task?
I would like to know before I foolishly generate 5k samples and find them useless in the end.
EDIT: I also don't know the exact color of the objects. If I feed the program samples of varying color, will it be a problem?
Thanks in advance!!
Edit2: Here's what groups from my school detected in previous years
As you can see, the detected images are not nearly as flawless as what would appear in real life. If you can suggest a better method, that would help.
If you think that the real images will have unique colors with simple geometric shapes then you could probably try to create a normalized Hue-histogram. Use it to train SVM classifier. The benefit of using Hue-histogram is that it will be rotational and scale invariant.
You can take the few precautions in mind:
Don't forget to remove the illumination affects.
Sometimes, White and black pixels create some problem in hue-histogram calculation so try to remove them from calculation by considering only those pixel which have S>0 and V>0 in S & V channels of HSV image.
I would rather suggest you to use the real world images because the performance is largely dependent upon training (my personal experience). And why don't you try to use SIFT/SURF descriptors for training to SVM (support vector machine) as SIFT/SURF are scale as well as rotational invariant.

Face Recognition Logic

I want to develop an application in which user input an image (of a person), a system should be able to identify face from an image of a person. System also works if there are more than one persons in an image.
I need a logic, I dont have any idea how can work on image pixel data in such a manner that it identifies person faces.
Eigenface might be a good algorithm to start with if you're looking to build a system for educational purposes, since it's relatively simple and serves as the starting point for a lot of other algorithms in the field. Basically what you do is take a bunch of face images (training data), switch them to grayscale if they're RGB, resize them so that every image has the same dimensions, make the images into vectors by stacking the columns of the images (which are now 2D matrices) on top of each other, compute the mean of every pixel value in all the images, and subtract that value from every entry in the matrix so that the component vectors won't be affine. Once that's done, you compute the covariance matrix of the result, solve for its eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and find the principal components. These components will serve as the basis for a vector space, and together describe the most significant ways in which face images differ from one another.
Once you've done that, you can compute a similarity score for a new face image by converting it into a face vector, projecting into the new vector space, and computing the linear distance between it and other projected face vectors.
If you decide to go this route, be careful to choose face images that were taken under an appropriate range of lighting conditions and pose angles. Those two factors play a huge role in how well your system will perform when presented with new faces. If the training gallery doesn't account for the properties of a probe image, you're going to get nonsense results. (I once trained an eigenface system on random pictures pulled down from the internet, and it gave me Bill Clinton as the strongest match for a picture of Elizabeth II, even though there was another picture of the Queen in the gallery. They both had white hair, were facing in the same direction, and were photographed under similar lighting conditions, and that was good enough for the computer.)
If you want to pull faces from multiple people in the same image, you're going to need a full system to detect faces, pull them into separate files, and preprocess them so that they're comparable with other faces drawn from other pictures. Those are all huge subjects in their own right. I've seen some good work done by people using skin color and texture-based methods to cut out image components that aren't faces, but these are also highly subject to variations in training data. Color casting is particularly hard to control, which is why grayscale conversion and/or wavelet representations of images are popular.
Machine learning is the keystone of many important processes in an FR system, so I can't stress the importance of good training data enough. There are a bunch of learning algorithms out there, but the most important one in my view is the naive Bayes classifier; the other methods converge on Bayes as the size of the training dataset increases, so you only need to get fancy if you plan to work with smaller datasets. Just remember that the quality of your training data will make or break the system as a whole, and as long as it's solid, you can pick whatever trees you like from the forest of algorithms that have been written to support the enterprise.
EDIT: A good sanity check for your training data is to compute average faces for your probe and gallery images. (This is exactly what it sounds like; after controlling for image size, take the sum of the RGB channels for every image and divide each pixel by the number of images.) The better your preprocessing, the more human the average faces will look. If the two average faces look like different people -- different gender, ethnicity, hair color, whatever -- that's a warning sign that your training data may not be appropriate for what you have in mind.
Have a look at the Face Recognition Hompage - there are algorithms, papers, and even some source code.
There are many many different alghorithms out there. Basically what you are looking for is "computer vision". We had made a project in university based around facial recognition and detection. What you need to do is google extensively and try to understand all this stuff. There is a bit of mathematics involved so be prepared. First go to wikipedia. Then you will want to search for pdf publications of specific algorithms.
You can go a hard way - write an implementaion of all alghorithms by yourself. Or easy way - use some computer vision library like OpenCV or OpenVIDIA.
And actually it is not that hard to make something that will work. So be brave. A lot harder is to make a software that will work under different and constantly varying conditions. And that is where google won't help you. But I suppose you don't want to go that deep.

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