Shape context matching in OpenCV - image-processing

Have OpenCV implementation of shape context matching? I've found only matchShapes() function which do not work for me. I want to get from shape context matching set of corresponding features. Is it good idea to compare and find rotation and displacement of detected contour on two different images.
Also some example code will be very helpfull for me.
I want to detect for example pink square, and in the second case pen. Other examples could be squares with some holes, stars etc.

The basic steps of Image Processing is
Image Acquisition > Preprocessing > Segmentation > Representation > Recognition
And what you are asking for seems to lie within the representation part os this general algorithm. You want some features that descripes the objects you are interested in, right? Before sharing what I've done for simple hand-gesture recognition, I would like you to consider what you actually need. A lot of times simplicity will make it a lot easier. Consider a fixed color on your objects, consider background subtraction (these two main ties to preprocessing and segmentation). As for representation, what features are you interested in? and can you exclude the need of some of these features.
My project group and I have taken a simple approach to preprocessing and segmentation, choosing a green glove for our hand. Here's and example of the glove, camera and detection on the screen:
We have used a threshold on defects, and specified it to find defects from fingers, and we have calculated the ratio of a rotated rectangular boundingbox, to see how quadratic our blod is. With only four different hand gestures chosen, we are able to distinguish these with only these two features.
The functions we have used, and the measurements are all available in the documentation on structural analysis for OpenCV, and for acces of values in vectors (which we've used a lot), can be found in the documentation for vectors in c++
I hope you can use the train of thought put into this; if you want more specific info I'll be happy to comment, Enjoy.

Related

How to detect hand palm and its orientation (like facing outwards)?

I am working on a hand detection project. There are many good project on web to do this, but what I need is a specific hand pose detection. It needs a totally open palm and the whole palm face to outwards, like the image below:
The first hand faces to inwards, so it will not be detected, and the right one faces to outwards, it will be detected. Now I can detect hand with OpenCV. but how to tell the hand orientation?
Problem of matching with the forehand belongs to the texture classification, it's a classic pattern recognition problem. I suggest you to try one of the following methods:
Gabor filters: it is good to detect the orientation and pixel intensities (as forehand has different features), opencv has getGaborKernel function, the very important params of this function is theta (orientation) and lambd: (frequencies). To make it simple you can apply this process on a cropped zone of palm (as you have already detected it, it would be easy to crop for example the thumb, or a rectangular zone around the gravity center..etc). Then you can convolute it with a small database of images of the same zone to get the a rate of matching, or you can use the SVM classifier, where you have to train your SVM on a set of images by constructing the training matrix needed for SVM (check this question), this paper
Local Binary Patterns (LBP): it's an important feature descriptor used for texture matching, you can apply it on whole palm image or on a cropped zone or finger of image, it's easy to use in opencv, a lot of tutorials with codes are available for this method. I recommend you to read this paper talking about Invariant Texture Classification
with Local Binary Patterns. here is a good tutorial
Haralick Texture: I've read that it works perfectly when a set of features quantifies the entire image (Global Feature Descriptors). it's not implemented in opencv but easy to be implemented, check this useful tutorial
Training Models: I've already suggested a SVM classifier, to be coupled with some descriptor, that can works perfectly.
Opencv has an interesting FaceRecognizer class for face recognition, it could be an interesting idea to use it replacing the face images by the palm ones, (do resizing and rotation to get an unique pose of palm), this class has three methods can be used, one of them is Local Binary Patterns Histograms, which is recommended for texture recognition. and why not to try the other models (Eigenfaces and Fisherfaces ) , check this tutorial
well if you go for a MacGyver way you can notice that the left hand has bones sticking out in a certain direction, while the right hand has all finger lines and a few lines in the hand palms.
These lines are always sort of the same, so you could try to detect them with opencv edge detection or hough lines. Due to the dark color of the lines, you might even be able to threshold them out of it. Then gather the information from those lines, like angles, regressions, see which features you can collect and train a simple decision tree.
That was assuming you do not have enough data, if you have then you go into deeplearning, just take a basic inceptionV3 model and retrain the last dense layer to classify between two classes with a softmax, or to predict the probablity if the hand being up/down with sigmoid. Check this link, Tensorflow got your back on the training of this one, pure already ready code to execute.
Questions? Ask away
Take a look at what leap frog has done with the oculus rift. I'm not sure what they're using internally to segment hand poses, but there is another paper that produces hand poses effectively. If you have a stereo camera setup, you can use this paper's methods: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.07214.pdf.
The only promising solutions I've seen for mono camera train on large datasets.
use Haar-Cascade classifier,
you can get the classifier model file then use it here.
Just search for 'Haarcascade detection of Palm in Google' or use below code.
import cv2
cam=cv2.VideoCapture(0)
ccfr2=cv2.CascadeClassifier('haar-cascade-files-master/palm.xml')
while True:
retval,image=cam.read()
grey=cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
palm=ccfr2.detectMultiScale(grey,scaleFactor=1.05,minNeighbors=3)
for x,y,w,h in palm:
image=cv2.rectangle(image,(x,y),(x+w,y+h),(256,256,256),2)
cv2.imshow("Window",image)
if cv2.waitKey(1) & 0xFF==ord('q'):
cv2.destroyAllWindows()
break
del(cam)
Best of Luck for your experience using HaarCascade.

How can I transform an image to match a circular model in OpenCV

I'm trying to make a program that can take an image of a dartboard and read the score. So far I can get the position of each dart by comparing it to a model image as you can see here:
However this only works if the input image is practically the same. In this other case the board is slightly in a different perspective so I was thinking maybe I can transform the image to match the model image and then do the process that you can see above.
So my question is: How can I transform this last image to match the shape and pespective of the model dart board with OpenCV?
The dart board is basically planar. Thus, you can model the wanted transformation by a homography. Now you can perform a simple feature extraction and matching like here or if speed is not as important utilize an intensity based parametric alignment algorithm (more accurate).
However, as already mentioned in the comments, it will not be as simple afterwards. The dart flights will (depending on the distortion) most likely cover an area of your board which does not coincide with the actual score. Actually, even with a frontal view it is difficult to say.
I assume you will have to find the point on which the darts stick in your board. Furthermore, I think this will be easier with a view from a certain angle. Maybe, you can fit lines segments just in the area where you detected a difference beforehand.
I don't think comparing an image with the model that was captured using a different subject with a different angle is a good idea. There should be lots of small differences even after perfectly matching them geometrically - like shades, lighting, color differences, etc.
I would just capture an image every time the game begin (reference) and extract the features (straight lines seem good enough) and then after the game, capture an image, subtract the reference, and do blob analysis to find darts.

Comparing similar images as photographs -- detecting difference, image diff

The situation is kind of unique from anything I have been able to find asked already, and is as follows: If I took a photo of two similar images, I'd like to be able to highlight the differing features in the two images. For example the following two halves of a children's spot the difference game:
The differences in the images will be bits missing/added and/or colour change, and the type of differences which would be easily detectable from the original image files by doing nothing cleverer than a pixel-by-pixel comparison. However the fact that they're subject to the fluctuations of light and imprecision of photography, I'll need a far more lenient/clever algorithm.
As you can see, the images won't necessarily line up perfectly if overlaid.
This question is tagged language-agnostic as I expect answers that point me towards relevant algorithms, however I'd also be interested in current implementations if they exist, particularly in Java, Ruby, or C.
The following approach should work. All of these functionalities are available in OpenCV. Take a look at this example for computing homographies.
Detect keypoints in the two images using a corner detector.
Extract descriptors (SIFT/SURF) for the keypoints.
Match the keypoints and compute a homography using RANSAC, that aligns the second image to the first.
Apply the homography to the second image, so that it is aligned with the first.
Now simply compute the pixel-wise difference between the two images, and the difference image will highlight everything that has changed from the first to the second.
My general approach would be to use an optical flow to align both images and perform a pixel by pixel comparison once they are aligned.
However, for the specifics, standard optical flows (OpenCV etc.) are likely to fail if the two images differ significantly like in your case. If that indeed fails, there are recent optical flow techniques that are supposed to work even if the images are drastically different. For instance, you might want to look at the paper about SIFT flows by Ce Liu et al that addresses this problem with sparse correspondences.

find mosquitos' head in the image

I have images of mosquitos similar to these ones and I would like to automatically circle around the head of each mosquito in the images. They are obviously in different orientations and there are random number of them in different images. some error is fine. Any ideas of algorithms to do this?
This problem resembles a face detection problem, so you could try a naïve approach first and refine it if necessary.
First you would need to recreate your training set. For this you would like to extract small images with examples of what is a mosquito head or what is not.
Then you can use those images to train a classification algorithm, be careful to have a balanced training set, since if your data is skewed to one class it would hit the performance of the algorithm. Since images are 2D and algorithms usually just take 1D arrays as input, you will need to arrange your images to that format as well (for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-major_order).
I normally use support vector machines, but other algorithms such as logistic regression could make the trick too. If you decide to use support vector machines I strongly recommend you to check libsvm (http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/), since it's a very mature library with bindings to several programming languages. Also they have a very easy to follow guide targeted to beginners (http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/papers/guide/guide.pdf).
If you have enough data, you should be able to avoid tolerance to orientation. If you don't have enough data, then you could create more training rows with some samples rotated, so you would have a more representative training set.
As for the prediction what you could do is given an image, cut it using a grid where each cell has the same dimension that the ones you used on your training set. Then you pass each of this image to the classifier and mark those squares where the classifier gave you a positive output. If you really need circles then take the center of the given square and the radius would be the half of the square side size (sorry for stating the obvious).
So after you do this you might have problems with sizes (some mosquitos might appear closer to the camera than others) , since we are not trained the algorithm to be tolerant to scale. Moreover, even with all mosquitos in the same scale, we still might miss some of them just because they didn't fit in our grid perfectly. To address this, we will need to repeat this procedure (grid cut and predict) rescaling the given image to different sizes. How many sizes? well here you would have to determine that through experimentation.
This approach is sensitive to the size of the "window" that you are using, that is also something I would recommend you to experiment with.
There are some research may be useful:
A Multistep Approach for Shape Similarity Search in Image Databases
Representation and Detection of Shapes in Images
From the pictures you provided this seems to be an extremely hard image recognition problem, and I doubt you will get anywhere near acceptable recognition rates.
I would recommend a simpler approach:
First, if you have any control over the images, separate the mosquitoes before taking the picture, and use a white unmarked underground, perhaps even something illuminated from below. This will make separating the mosquitoes much easier.
Then threshold the image. For example here i did a quick try taking the red channel, then substracting the blue channel*5, then applying a threshold of 80:
Use morphological dilation and erosion to get rid of the small leg structures.
Identify blobs of the right size to be moquitoes by Connected Component Labeling. If a blob is large enough to be two mosquitoes, cut it out, and apply some more dilation/erosion to it.
Once you have a single blob like this
you can find the direction of the body using Principal Component Analysis. The head should be the part of the body where the cross-section is the thickest.

Object Detection using OpenCV in C++

I'm currently working on a vision system for a UAV I am building. The goal of the system is to find target objects, which are rather well defined (see below), in a video stream that will be a 2-D flyover view of the ground. So far I have tried training and using a Haar-like feature based cascade, a la Viola Jones, to do the detection. I am training it with 5000+ images of the targets at different angles (perspective shifts) and ranges (sizes in the frame), but only 1900 "background" images. This does not yield good results at all, as I cannot find a suitable number of stages to the cascade that balances few false positives with few false negatives.
I am looking for advice from anyone who has experience in this area, as to whether I should: 1) ditch the cascade, in favor of something more suitable to objects defined by their outline and color (which I've read the VJ cascade is not).
2) improve my training set for the cascade, either by adding positives, background frames, organizing/shooting them better, etc.
3) Some other approach I can't fathom currently.
A description of the targets:
Primary shapes: triangles, squares, circles, ellipses, etc.
Distinct, solid, primary (or close to) colors.
Smallest dimension between two and eight feet (big enough to be seen easily from a couple hundred feet AGL
Large, single alphanumeric in the center of the object, with its own distinct, solid, primary or almost primary color.
My goal is use something very fast, such as the VJ cascade, to find possible objects and their associated bounding box, and then pass these on to finer processing routines to determine the properties (color of the object and AN, value of the AN, actual shape, and GPS location). Any advice you can give me towards completing this goal would be much appreciated. The source code I currently have is a little lengthy for post here, but is freely available should you like to see it for reference. Thanks in advance!
-JB
I would recommend ditching Haar classification, since you know a lot about your objects. In these cases you should start by checking what features you can use:
1) overhead flight means, as you said, you can basically treat these as fixed shapes on a 2D plane. There will be scaling, rotations and some minor affine transformations, which depends a lot on how wide-angled your camera is. If it isn't particularly wide-angled, that part can probably be ignored. Also, you probably know your altitude, by which you can probably also make very good assumption on the target size (scaling).
2) You know the colors, which also makes it quite easy to find objects. If these are very defined as primary color, then you can just filter the image based on color and find those contours. If you want to do something a little more advanced (which to me doesn't seem necessary though...) you can do a backprojection, which in my experience is very effective and fast. Note, if you're creating the objects, it would be better to use Red Green and Blue instead of primary colors (red green and yellow). Then you can simply split the image into it's respective channels and use a very high threshold.
3) You know the geometric shapes. I've never done this myself, but as far as I know, the options are using moments or using Hough transforms (although openCV only has hough algorithms for lines and circles, so you'd have to write your own for other shapes...). You might already have sufficiently good results without this step though...
If you want more specific recommendations, it would be very useful to upload a couple sample images. :)
May be solved but I came across a paper recently with an open-source license for generic object detection using normalised gradient features : http://mmcheng.net/bing/comment-page-9/
The details of the algorithms performance against illumination, rotation and scale may require a little digging. I can't remember on the top of my head where the original paper is.

Resources