I have a some scanned images, where the scanner appears to have introduced a certain kind of noise that I've not encountered before. I would like to find a way to remove it automatically. The noise looks like high frequency vertical shear. In other words, a horizontal line that should look like ------------ shows up as /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\, where the amplitude and frequency of the shear seem pretty regular.
Can someone suggest a way of doing the following steps?
Given an image, identify the frequency and amplitude of the shear noise. One can assume that it is always vertical and the characteristic frequency is higher than other frequencies that naturally appear in the image.
Given the above parameters, apply an opposite, vertical, periodic shear to the image to cancel this noise.
It would also be helpful to know how these could be implemented using the tools implemented by a freely available image processing package. (Netpbm, ImageMagick, Gimp, some Python library are some examples.)
Update: Here's a sample from an image with this kind of distortion. Actually, this sample shows that the shear amplitude need not be uniform throughout the image. :-(
The original images are higher resolution (600 dpi).
My solution to the problem would be to convert the image to frequency domain using FFT. The result will be two matrices: the image signal amplitude and the image signal phase. These two matrices should have the same dimensions of the input image.
Now, you should use the amplitude matrix to detect a spike in the area tha corresponds to the noise frequency. Note that the top left of this corner of this matrix should correspond to low frequency components and bottom right to high frequencies.
After you have indentified the spike, you should set the corresponding coefficients (amplitude matrix entries) to zero. After you apply the inverse FFT you should get the input image without the noise.
Please provide an example image for a more concrete (a practical) solution to your problem.
You could use a Hough fit or RANSAC to fit lines first. For Hough to work you may need to "smear" the points using Gaussian blur or morphological dilation so that you get more hits for a given (rho, theta) line in parameter space.
Once you have line fits, you can determine the relative distance of the original points to each line. From that spatial information you can use FFT to find help find a "best fit" spatial frequency and then shift pixels up/down accordingly.
As a first take, you might even skip FFT and use more of a brute force method:
Find the best fit lines using Hough or RANSAC.
Determine the orientation of the lines.
Sampling perpendicular to the (nominally) horizontal lines, find the points along that column with respect to the closest best fit lines.
If the points along one sample are on average a distance +N away from their best fit lines, shift all the pixels in that column (or along that perpendicular sample) by -N.
This sort of technique should work if the shear is consistent along a vertical sample, but not necessarily from left to right. If the shear is always exactly vertical, then finding horizontal lines should be relatively easy.
Judging from your sample image, it looks as though the shear may be consistent across a horizontal line segment between a 3-way or 4-way intersection with a nominally vertical line segment. You could use corner detectors or other methods to find these intersections to limit the extent over which a pixel shifting operation takes place.
A technique I posted here is another way to find horizontal stretches of dark pixels in case they don't fall on a line:
Is there an efficient algorithm for segmentation of handwritten text?
All that aside, is there a chance you could have the scanner fixed?
Related
I am coding a program in OpenCV where I want to adjust camera position. Is there any metric in OpenCV to measure the amount of perspective in two images? How can a homography be used to quantify the degree of perspective in two images? The method that comes to my mind is to run edge detection and compare the parallel edge sizes but that method is prone to errors.
As a first solution I'd recommend maximizing the distance between the image of the line at infinity and the center of your picture.
Identify at least two pairs of lines that are parallel in the original image. Intersect the lines of each pair and connect the resulting points. Best do all of this in homogeneous coordinates so you won't have to worry about lines being still parallel in the transformed version. Compute the distance between the center of the image and that line, possibly taking the resolution of the image into account somehow to make the result invariant to resampling. The result will be infinity for an image obtained from a pure affine transformation. So the larger that value the closer you are to the affine scenario.
I am interested in detecting single object more precisely a fire extinguisher which has no inter class variability (all fire extinguisher looks same). However, The application is supposedly realtime i.e a robot is exploring the environment and whenever it sees the object of interest it should be able to detect it and give pixel coordinates of it.
My question is which algorithm will be good choice for this task?
1. Is this a classification problem and should we use features(sift/surf etc) + bow +svm?
2. some other solution (no idea yet).
Any kind of input will be appreciated.
Thanks.
(P.S bear with me i am newbie to computer vision and stack over flow)
update1:
Height varies all are mounted on the wall but with different height. I tried with SIFT features and bow but it is expensive to extract bow descriptors in testing part. Moreover I have no idea how to locate the object(pixel coordinates) inside the image after its been classified positive.
update 2:
I finally used sift + bow + svm and am able to classify the object. But using this technique, i only get output interms of whether the object is present in the scene or not?
How can i detect the object i.e getting the bounding box or centre of the object. what is the compatible approach with the above method for achieving these results.
Thank you all.
I would suggest using color as the main feature to look for, and only try other features as needed. The fire extinguisher red is very distinctive, and should not occur too often elsewhere in an office environment. Other, more computationally expensive tests can then be performed only in regions of the right color.
Here is a good tutorial for color detection that also explains how to find good thresholds for your desired color.
I would suggest the following approach:
denoise your image with a median filter
convert the image to HSV format (Hue, Saturation, Value)
select pixels close to that particular shade of red with InRange()
Now you have a binary image image that contains only the pixels that are red.
count the number of red pixels with CountNonZero()
If that number is too small, abort
remove noise from the binary image by morphological opening / closing
find contours of all blobs in your picture with findContours or the CvBlob library
check if there are blobs of the correct width, correct height and correct width/height ratio
since your fire extinguishers are vertical cylinders, the width/height ratio will be constant from every angle. The width and height will of course vary somewhat with distance to the camera.
if the width and height do not match, abort
repeat these steps to find the black-colored part on the bottom of the extinguisher,
abort if there is no black region with correct width/height below the red region
(perhaps also repeat these steps for the metallic top and the yellow rectangle)
These tests should all be very fast. If they are too slow, you could reduce the resolution of your input images.
Depending on your environment, it is possible that this is already a robust enough test. If not, you can proceed with sift/surf feature matching, but only in a small region around the blobs with the correct color. You also do not necessarily have to do that for each frame, each n-th frame should be be enough for confirmation.
This is a old question .. but will still like to give my recommendation to use YOLO algorithm to solve this problem.
YOLO fits very well to this scenario.
Is it possible to make Canny to ignore short edges or to ignore low gradient edges? In my case I have card lying on wood and see numerous edges of wood structure after canny
What two thresholds in canny functions are for?
Large intensity gradients are more likely to correspond to edges than
small intensity gradients. It is in most cases impossible to specify a
threshold at which a given intensity gradient switches from
corresponding to an edge into not doing so. Therefore Canny uses
thresholding with hysteresis.
Thresholding with hysteresis requires two thresholds – high and low.
Making the assumption that important edges should be along continuous
curves in the image allows us to follow a faint section of a given
line and to discard a few noisy pixels that do not constitute a line
but have produced large gradients. Therefore we begin by applying a
high threshold. This marks out the edges we can be fairly sure are
genuine. Starting from these, using the directional information
derived earlier, edges can be traced through the image. While tracing
an edge, we apply the lower threshold, allowing us to trace faint
sections of edges as long as we find a starting point.
Once this process is complete we have a binary image where each pixel
is marked as either an edge pixel or a non-edge pixel. From
complementary output from the edge tracing step, the binary edge map
obtained in this way can also be treated as a set of edge curves,
which after further processing can be represented as polygons in the
image domain.
See also:
Thresholds: the use of two thresholds with hysteresis allows more
flexibility than in a single-threshold approach, but general problems
of thresholding approaches still apply. A threshold set too high can
miss important information. On the other hand, a threshold set too low
will falsely identify irrelevant information (such as noise) as
important. It is difficult to give a generic threshold that works well
on all images. No tried and tested approach to this problem yet
exists.
In your case you can probably increase the threshold value a bit to see if it reduces the short lines a bit more.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canny_edge_detector#Tracing_edges_through_the_image_and_hysteresis_thresholding
Update:
For this image I would perhaps pre-process it by applying lower contrast to it. This can help reduce the details in the background of the image a bit before you run it through the blurring and line detector.
Using GaussianBlur() before Canny will help remove much of the unwanted detail. And maybe increase the low threshhold as #Ken suggested
What are the possible fast ways to detect circle in an image ?
For ex:
i have an image with one Big Circle and has 6 small circles inside big Circle.
I need to find a big circle without using Hough Circles(OpencV).
Standard algorithms to find circles are Hough (which jamk mentioned in the comments) and RANSAC. Parameterizing these algorithms will set a baseline speed for your application.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hough_transform
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANSAC
To speed up these algorithms, you can look at your collection of images and decide whether limiting the search ranges will help speed up the search. That's straightforward enough: only search within a reasonable range for the radius. Since they take edge points as inputs, you can also look at methods to reduce the number of edge points checked.
However, there are a few other tricks to speed up processing.
Carefully set the range or ranges over which radii are checked. For example, you might not simply check from the smallest possible radius to the largest possible radius, but instead you might split the search into two different ranges: from radius R1 to R2, and then from radius R3 to R4.
Ditch the Canny edge detection in favor of the fastest possible edge detection your application can tolerate. (You can ditch Canny for lots of applications.)
Preprocess your image of edge points to eliminate outliers. The appropriate algorithm to eliminate outliers will be specific to your image set, but you'll probably be able to find an algorithm that eliminates obvious outliers and thereby saves some search time in the more expensive circle fit algorithms.
If your circles are very well defined, and all or nearly all points are present, figure out how you might match only a quarter circle or semicircle instead of a full circle.
Long story short: start with a complete implementation and benchmark it, then gradually tighten up parameter settings and limit search ranges while ensuring that you can still find circles for your application and your image set.
If your images are amenable to scaling, then one possibility is to create an image pyramid of images at different scales: 1/2 scale, 1/4 scale, 1/8 scale, etc. You'll need an edge-preserving scaling method at smaller scales.
Once you have your image pyramid, try the following:
Find circles at the very smallest scale. The image will be small and
the range of possible radii will be limited, so this should be a
quick operation.
If you find a circle using the initial fit at the small scale, improve the fit by testing in the next larger scale image -OR- go ahead and search in the full scale image.
Check the next largest scale. Circles that weren't visible in the smaller scale image may suddenly "appear" in the current scale.
Repeat the steps above through all scales in the image.
Image scaling will be a fast operation, and you can see that if at least one of your circles is present in a smaller scale image you should be able to reduce the total number of cycles by performing a rough circle fit in the small scale image and then optimizing the fit for those edge points alone in the full scale image.
Edge-preserving scaling can also make it possible to use correlation-type tools to find circles, but being able to do so depends on the content of your images, including the noise, how completely edge points represent circles, and so on.
Maybe, detect contours and check their properties, e.g. try to use cv::isContourConvex or another way could be to use the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix and check if contour's representative ellipse first eccentricity is ~0.
In my application I am getting images (captured by a high speed camera) containing projections of some light sources on the screen.
1-My first task is to plot a PDF or intensity distribution plot for the light intensity, which should come as bell shape or Gaussian, since at the center the light intensity will be maximum and at the ends it will be diminishing. Like this(just for example, not the exact case for me):
In worst cases I will be having a series of light sources illuminated simultaneously. In such cases theoretically I should get overlapping bell or Gaussian curves, some what like this:
How do I plot such a curve given the Images of light projection (like the one in the figure)?
2-After the Gaussian curve is drawn, the next job is to analyze the same such as finding width and height of the curve. How do I go for this?
I want an executable for this application, so a solution given by MATLAB or similar tool is not acceptable to my client. Also i want the solution to work in real time or near real time.
I guess OpenCV can be used here. But before I start I would like to know opinions of Image processing gurus on this forum. Especially for the step -1 above, I need some inputs.
Any pointers here?
Rgrds,
Heshsham
Note: Image is taken from http://pentileblog.com.
To get the 1D Gaussian out of the 2D one, you can do a couple of things depending on what you want exactly.
- You could sum over every column of the image;
- You could find the local maximum in intensity and copy the intensity profile of that row of the image only;
- You could threshold the image (in case your maximum will be saturated and therefore a plateau), determine the center of gravity of the remaining blob, and copy that row's intensity profile;
- You could threshold, find contours, determine multiple local maxima, and grab multiple intensity profiles if the application calls for it (e.g. if the blobs are not horizontally aligned).
To get the height and width, it's pretty easy, just find the maximum and the points left and right of it where the curve drops to half of the maximum. The standard deviation is the distance between the two points divided by 2.35 (wikipedia link).
Well I solved it:
Algorithms is as follows:
1-use cvSampleLine for reading a particual line of image
2- use cvMinMaxLoc to know the maximum pixel value in a line
3- Note which of these lines is having highest pixel value. Lets say line no. 150
4- Plot pixel value for line 150.
I used MATLAB for verifying my results and graphs, and the OpenCV result is exactly the same.
Thanks for your suggestions guys.