Find longevity of contours in opencv - 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

Related

Draw a line between two points having smallest distance in them in image Python openCV PIL

I have an cropped image as below which actually denotes number 2
However the image is cropped such that the left part is slightly chopped off. To repair this my logic is i would be connecting two end points having the minimum distance between them/ have minimum white area between them to form something like this
How do i achieve this i do not want all end points to get connected only the two end points having minimum distance should get connected.
I don't want some thing like this
I am a novice in Image processing using openCV python. How should i go about this?
You may find Hausdorff distance between the two contours and get the nearest points between the contours. For this particular case, I would proceed as follows
Invert the image
Get the contours
filter out the unwanted contours based on their size
find Hausdorff distance between the two contours (and the corresponding end points)
draw a dilated line

Opencv divide a contour in two sections

I have a contour in Opencv with a convexity defect (the one in red) and I want to cut that contour in two parts, horizontally traversing that point, is there anyway to do it, so I just get the contour marked in yellow?
Image describing the problem
That's an interesting question. There are some solutions based on how the concavity points are distributed in your image.
1) If such points does not occur at the bottom of the contour (like your simple example). Then here is a pseudo-code.
Find convex hull C of the image I.
Subtract I from C, that will give you the concavity areas (like the black triangle between two white triangles in your example).
The point with the minimum y value in that area gives you the horizontal line to cut.
2) If such points can occur anywhere, you need a more intelligent algorithm which has cut lines that are not constrained by only being horizontal (because the min-y point of that difference will be the min-y of the image). You can find the "inner-most" corner points, and connect them to each other. You can recursively cut the remainder in y-,x+,y+,x- directions. It really depends on the specs of your input.

How does meanshift tracking work? (using histograms)

I know, that the Meanshift-Algorithm calculates the mean of a pixel density and checks, if the center of the roi is equal with this point. If not, it moves the new ROI center to the mean center and checks again... . Like in this picture:
For density, it is clear how to find the mean point. But it can't simply calculate the mean of a histogram and get the new position by this point. How can this algorithm work using color histogram?
The feature space in your image is 2D.
Say you have an intensity image (so it's 1D) then you would just have a line (e.g. from 0 to 255) on which the points are located. The circles shown above would just be line segments on that [0,255] line. Depending on their means, these line segments would then shift, just like the circles do in 2D.
You talked about color histograms, so I assume you are talking about RGB.
In that case your feature space is 3D, so you have a sphere instead of a line segment or circle. Your axes are R,G,B and pixels from your image are points in that 3D feature space. You then still look where the mean of a sphere is, to then shift the center towards that mean.

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 straight line segments in image using 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)

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