Find straight line segments in image using OpenCV - opencv

Using OpenCV's findContours() I have a list of contours in an image. I'm interested only in the straight lines, so if they are too 'squiggly' they should be rejected. The question is how to evaluate how straight each contour is?
I looked at fitLine(), but there doesn't appear to be a goodness-of-fit measure returned. I could evaluate this myself using the returned line.
I looked at arcLength() with the aim to compare this to the bounding rectangle dimensions, but even for somewhat straight lines, the arc length can be relatively long if the contour points are dense.
I could find the convex hull and compare to the bounding rectangle dimensions, but I'd have to analyze the convexity defects.
Is there a moment that would be useful here?

Find the contours as you are doing now
Find the straight lines in the image using HoughLines()
Compute the overlap between the contours and the straight lines

Take two points (with for instance cv::approxPoly) on your contour and compute their absolute distance. Then go through the contour points between the two points and add up all the distances. If the difference between distance over the contour and the absolute distance is bigger than a certain threshold you can reject it.

The function, findContours() already approximated contours with line segments somehow. Each contour is represented by a list of points around it. For your purpose, simply computing the distances of each pair of consecutive points in the contour would give you all line segment lengths.
Here is an example:
c = cnts[0]
#d is the points in contour c shifted by one with wraparound (numpy.roll)
d = np.roll(c, 1, axis=0)
np.linalg.norm(c - d, axis = -1)

Related

Detecting incomplete rectangles (missing corners/ short endges) in OpenCV

I've been working off a variant of the opencv squares sample to detect rectangles. It's working fine for closed rectangles, but I was wondering what approaches I could take to detect rectangles that have openings ie missing corners, lines that are too short.
I perform some dilation, which closes small gaps but not these larger ones.
I considered using a convex hull or bounding rect to generate a contour for comparison but since the edges of the rectangle are disconnected, each would read as a separate contour.
I think the first step is to detect which lines are candidates for forming a complete rectangle, and then perform some sort of line extrapolation. This seems promising, but my rectangle edges won't lie perfectly horizontally or vertically.
I'm trying to detect the three leftmost rectangles in this image:
Perhaps this paper is of interest? Rectangle Detection based on a Windowed Hough Transform
Basically, take the hough line transform of the image. You will get maximums at the locations in (theta, rho) space which relate to the places where there are lines. The larger the value, the longer/straighter the line. Maybe do a threshold to only get the best lines. Then, we are trying to look for pairs of lines which are
1) parallel: the maximums occur at similar theta values
2) similar length: the values of the maximums are similar
3) orthogonal to another pair of lines: theta values are 90 degrees away from other pairs' theta values
There are some more details in the paper, such as doing the transform in a sliding window, and then using an error metric to consolidate multiple matches.

Find longevity of contours in opencv

I want to detect small straight lines in a noisy image. For this I
- find contours in an image,
- fit an ellipse on it
- and get the height by width ratio.
- If this ratio exceeds a certain threshold, I declare it as line segment.
This method works fine most of the time. But in certain cases (according to some documentation, when the contours self-intersect), the fitEllipse gives wrong results. It there any other method, I can determine the longevity of the contours? I do not intend to use Hough Lines.
One way to grow a line from contour points is to track pixels on the contour while checking for line straightness. At each new pixel you estimate the longest distance from the covered contour and the line connecting contour's beginning and the current contour point. When this distance exceeds a threshold you stop growing a line. In the picture below, the line is red, contour is black and the distance is green.
In your case (since you aren't growing the line) all you need to do is to connect two contour terminals and then scan the contour to get all the distances to the line and select the largest one. Compare it to your threshold to decide on the linearity of the segment.
Here is how to find the distance from point x, y to the line ax+by+c=0 or to the line defined by two points as in your case: link

corner detection using Chris Harris & Mike Stephens

I am not able to under stand the formula ,
What is W (window) and intensity in the formula mean,
I found this formula in opencv doc
http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/doc/py_tutorials/py_feature2d/py_features_harris/py_features_harris.html
For a grayscale image, intensity levels (0-255) tells you how bright is the pixel..hope that you already know about it.
So, now the explanation of your formula is below:
Aim: We want to find those points which have maximum variation in terms of intensity level in all direction i.e. the points which are very unique in a given image.
I(x,y): This is the intensity value of the current pixel which you are processing at the moment.
I(x+u,y+v): This is the intensity of another pixel which lies at a distance of (u,v) from the current pixel (mentioned above) which is located at (x,y) with intensity I(x,y).
I(x+u,y+v) - I(x,y): This equation gives you the difference between the intensity levels of two pixels.
W(u,v): You don't compare the current pixel with any other pixel located at any random position. You prefer to compare the current pixel with its neighbors so you chose some value for "u" and "v" as you do in case of applying Gaussian mask/mean filter etc. So, basically w(u,v) represents the window in which you would like to compare the intensity of current pixel with its neighbors.
This link explains all your doubts.
For visualizing the algorithm, consider the window function as a BoxFilter, Ix as a Sobel derivative along x-axis and Iy as a Sobel derivative along y-axis.
http://docs.opencv.org/doc/tutorials/imgproc/imgtrans/sobel_derivatives/sobel_derivatives.html will be useful to understand the final equations in the above pdf.

Getting corners from convex points

I have written algorithm to extract the points shown in the image. They form convex shape and I know order of them. How do I extract corners (top 3 and bottom 3) from such points?
I'm using opencv.
if you already have the convex hull of the object, and that hull includes the corner points, then all you need to to do is simplify the hull until it only has 6 points.
There are many ways to simplify polygons, for example you could just use this simple algorithm used in this answer: How to find corner coordinates of a rectangle in an image
do
for each point P on the convex hull:
measure its distance to the line AB _
between the point A before P and the point B after P,
remove the point with the smallest distance
repeat until 6 points left
If you do not know the exact number of points, then you could remove points until the minimum distance rises above a certain threshold
you could also do Ramer-Douglas-Peucker to simplify the polygon, openCV already has that implemented in cv::approxPolyDP.
Just modify the openCV squares sample to use 6 points instead of 4
Instead of trying to directly determine which of your feature points correspond to corners, how about applying an corner detection algorithm on the entire image then looking for which of your feature points appear close to peaks in the corner detector?
I'd suggest starting with a Harris corner detector. The OpenCV implementation is cv::cornerHarris.
Essentially, the Harris algorithm applies both a horizontal and a vertical Sobel filter to the image (or some other approximation of the partial derivatives of the image in the x and y directions).
It then constructs a 2 by 2 structure matrix at each image pixel, looks at the eigenvalues of that matrix, and calls points corners if both eigenvalues are above some threshold.

Contours matching - finding contours displacement

I found contours on two images with same object and I want to find displacement and rotation of this object. I've tried with rotated bounding boxes of this contours and then its angles and center points but rotations of bounding boxes don't tell about contour rotation correctly because it's the same for angles a+0, a+90, a+180 etc. degrees.
Is it any other good way to find rotation and displacement of contours? Maybe some use of convex hull, convexity defects? I've read in Learning OpenCv about matching contours but it hasn't helped. Could someone give some example?
//edit:
Maybe there is some way to use something similar to freeman chains to this? But I can't figure out algorithm at the moment. Making chain with angles between sequence point and then checking sequence match isn't working good...
If the object has convexity defects then you could choose one defect, make a vector from the centroid of the first contour to the centroid of this defect.
Then you could check the defects in the second contour and match the one that you used before.Again a vector from the centroid of the contour to the centroid of the matched defect.
From this you get 2 segments (vectors) from which you could obtain a displacement and a rotation.

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