How to determine the width of the lines? - opencv

Question

I need to detect the width of these lines:
These lines are parallel and have some noise on them.
Currently, what I do is:
1.Find the center using thinning (ZhangSuen)
ZhanSuenThinning(binImage, thin);
2.Compute the distance transform
cv::distanceTransform(binImage, distImg, CV_DIST_L2, CV_DIST_MASK_5);
3.Accumulate the half distance around the center
double halfWidth = 0.0;
int count = 0;
for(int a = 0; a < thinImg.cols; a++)
for(int b = 0; b < thinImg.rows; b++)
if(thinImg.ptr<uchar>(b, a)[0] > 0)
{
halfWidth += distImg.ptr<float>(b, a)[0];
count ++;
}
4.Finally, get the actual width
width = halfWidth / count * 2;
The result, isn't quite good, where it's wrong around 1-2 pixels. On bigger Image, the result is even worse, Any suggestion?

Answer 1

You can adapt barcode reader algorithms which is the faster way to do it.
Scan horizontal and vertical lines.
Lets X the length of the horizontal intersection with black line an Y the length of the vertical intersection (you can have it be calculating the median value of several X and Y if there are some noise).
X * Y / 2 = area
X²+Y² = hypotenuse²
hypotenuse * width / 2 = area
So : width = 2 * area / hypotenuse
EDIT : You can also easily find the angle by using PCA.

Answer 2

Al you need is find RotatedRect for each contour in your image, here is OpenCV tutorial how to do it. Then just take the values of 'size' from rotated rectangle where you will get height and width of contour, the height and width may interchange for different alignment of contour. Here in the above image the height become width and width become height.
Contour-->RotatedRect
|
'--> Size2f size
|
|-->width
'-->height
After find contour just do
RotatedRect minRect = minAreaRect( Mat(contours[i]) );
Size2f contourSize=minRect.size // width and height of the rectangle
Rotated rectangle for each contour
Here is C++ code
Mat src=imread("line.png",1);
Mat thr,gray;
blur(src,src,Size(3,3));
cvtColor(src,gray,CV_BGR2GRAY);
Canny(gray,thr,50, 190, 3, false );
vector<vector<Point> > contours;
vector<Vec4i> hierarchy;
findContours( thr.clone(),contours,hierarchy,CV_RETR_EXTERNAL,CV_CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE,Point(0,0));
vector<RotatedRect> minRect( contours.size() );
for( int i = 0; i < contours.size(); i++ )
minRect[i] = minAreaRect( Mat(contours[i]) );
for( int i = 0; i< contours.size(); i++ )
{
cout<<" Size ="<<minRect[i].size<<endl; //The width may interchange according to contour alignment
Size2f s=minRect[i].size;
// rotated rectangle
Point2f rect_points[4]; minRect[i].points( rect_points );
for( int j = 0; j < 4; j++ )
line( src, rect_points[j], rect_points[(j+1)%4], Scalar(0,0,255), 1, 8 );
}
imshow("src",src);
imshow("Canny",thr);

Answer 3

One quick and simple suggestion:
Count the total number of black pixels.
Detect the length of each line. (perhaps with CVHoughLinesP, or simply the diagonal of the bounding box around each thinned line)
Divide the number of black pixels by the sum of all line lengths, that should give you the average line width.
I am not sure whether that is more accurate than your existing approach though. The irregular end parts of each line might throw it of.
One thing you could try that could increase the accuracy for that case:
Measure the average angle of the lines
Rotate the image so the lines are aligned horizontally
crop a rectangular subsection of your shape, so all lines have the same length
(you can get the contour of your shape by morphological closing, then find a rectangle that is entirely contained within the shape. Make sure that the horizontal edges of the rectangle are inbetween lines)
then count the number of black pixels again (count gray pixels caused by rotating the image as x% of a whole pixel)
Divide by (rectangle_width * number_of_lines_in_rectangle)

Answer 4

Hough line fits to find each line
From each pixel on each line fit, scan in the perpendicular direction to get the distance to the edge. Find the edge using a spline fit or similar sub-pixel method.
Depending on your needs/desires, take the median or average distance. To eliminate problems with outliers, throw out the distances below the 10th percentile and above the 90th percentile before calculating the mean or median. You might also report the size using statistics: line width W, standard deviation S.
Although a connected components algorithm can be used to find the lines, it won't find the "true" edges as nicely as a spline fit.

Answer 5

The image like you shown is noisy/blurry and thus the number of black pixels might not reflect line properties; for example, black pixels can be partially attributed to salt-and-pepper noise. You can get rid of it with morphological erosion but this will affect your lines as well.
A better way is to extract connected components, delete small ones that likely come from noise or small blobs, then calculate the number of pixels and divide it on the number of lines. This approach will also help you to analyse the shape of the objects in your image and get rid of any artefacts other than noise or lines.
A different real word situation is when you have some grey pixels close to a line border. You can either use a threshold to discard them or count them with some weight<1. This will compensate for blur in your image. By the way, rotation of the image may increase the blur since it is typically done with interpolation and smoothing.