I'm new in Scilab and currently working on a project on barcode.
How can I locate barcode in an image of a product?
Is there any clue on what I can research on?
Divide image into NxM sub-images. Then folow either:
a) Make FFT on each sub-image and compare result with pre-computed 2D FFT of standard barcode image. (Because barcodes are pretty monotone and highly repetitive images they should generate similar FFT patterns)
b) Execute some thining (skeletonization) algorithm to leave only skeletons in images. Then do Radon or Hough transform on each skeleton sub-image and look for bunch of lines which has same deflection angle withing error bounds.
I personally would choose second way with pre-skeletonizing step because Radon/Hough transforms are especially designed for searching lines in images.
If the barcode is the only significant thing in the image, you could do a Radon transform and then calculate the RMS of each rotation, and keep the row with the highest value.
Related
What will be the procedure to correct the following distorted images ? It looks like the images are bulging out from center. These are of the same QR code, and so a combination of such images can be used to arrive at a single correct and straight image.
Please advice.
The distortion you are experiencing is called "barrel distortion". A technical name is "combination of radial distortion and tangential distortions"
The solution for your problem is openCV camera calibration module. Just google it and you will find documentations in openCV wiki. More over, openCV already has built in source code examples of how to calibrate the camera.
Basically, You need to print an image of a chess board, take a few pictures of it, run the calibration module (built in method) and get as output transformation matrix. For each video frame you apply this matrix (I think the method called cvUndistort()) and it will straighten the curved lines in the image.
Note: It will not work if you change the zoom or focal length of the camera.
If camera details are not available and uncontrollable - then your problem is very serious. There is a way to solve the distortion, but I don't know if openCV has built in modules for that. I am afraid that you will need to write a lot of code.
Basically - you need to detect as much as possible long lines. Then from those lines (vertical and horizontal) you build a grid of intersection points. Finally you fit the grid of those points to openCV calibration module.
If you have enough intersection points (say 20 or more) you will be able to calculate the distortion matrix and un-distort the image.
You will not be able to fully calibrate the camera. In other words, you will not be able to run a one time process that calculates the expected distortion. Rather - in each and every video frame, you will calculate the distortion matrix directly - reverse it and un-distort the image.
If you are not familiar with image processing techniques or unable to find a reliable open source code which directly solves your problem - then I am afraid that you will not be able to remove the distortion. sorry
I am working on a program to detect split fields for remote sensing (ie. more than one colour/field type within each image, where the image corresponds to the land owned by one farmer) and have been trying to find a solution by reading in images and posterizing them with a clustering algorithm, then analysing the colours and shapes present to try and 'score' each image and decide if more than one type of field is present. My program works reasonably well although there are still quite a few obvious splits that it fails to detect.
Up until now I have been doing this using only standard libraries in c++, but I think now that I should be using openCV or something and I was wondering which techniques to start with. I see there are some image segmentation and blob detection algorithms, but I'm not sure they are applicable because the boundary between fields tends to be blurred or low in contrast. The following are some sample images that I would expect my program to detect as 'split':
(True colour Landsat)
http://imgur.com/m9qWBcq
http://imgur.com/OwqvUvs
Are there any thoughts on how I could go about solving this problem in a different way? Thanks!
1) Convert to HSV and take H or take gray-scaled form. Apply median filter to smooth the fields :P if images are high-resolution.
2) Extract histogram and find all the peaks. These peaks indicate the different colored fields.
3) (A) Now you can use simple thresholding around these peaks-value and then find canny edges for trapezium or similar shapes.
--OR--
(B) Find canny-edges around the peak value ie for peak with maxima value x, find edge for range of (x - dx) to (x + dx) where dx is a small value to be find experimentally.
4) Now you can extract count of contours at different levels/peaks.
I haven't added code because language is not specified and all these constructs are readily available in OpenCV. Its fun to learn. Feel free to ask further. Happy Coding.
Try the implementations of the MSER algorithm in MserFeatureDetector.
The original algorithm was thought for grayscale pictures, and I don't have good experiences with the color version of it, so try to do some preprocesing of the original frames to generate grayscales according to our needs.
I've been trying to work on an image processing script /OCR that will allow me to extract the letters (using tesseract) from the boxes found in the image below.
Following alot of processing, I was able to get the picture to look like this
In order to remove the noise I inverted the image followed by floodfilling and gaussian blurring to remove noise. This is what I ended up with next.
After running it through some threholding and erosion to remove the noise (erosion being the step that distorted the text) I was able to get the image to look like this before running it through tesseract
This, while a pretty good rendering, allows for fairly accurate results through tesseract. Though it sometimes fails because it reads the hash (#) as a H or W. This leads me to my question!
Is there a way using opencv, skimage, PIL (opencv preferably) I can sharpen this image in order to increase my chances of tesseract properly reading my image? OR Is there a way I can get from the third to final image WITHOUT having to use erosion which ultimately distorted the text in the image.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
OpenCV does has functions like filter2D that convolves arbitrary kernel with given image. In particular you can use kernels that are used for image sharpening. The main question is whether this will improve the results of your OCR library or not. The image is already pretty sharp and the noise in the image is not a result of blur. I never worked with teseract myself, but I am fairly sure that it already does all the noise reduction it could. And 'helping' him in this process may actually have opposite effect. For example any sharpening process tends to amplify noise (as opposite to noise reduction processes that usually are blurring images). Most of computer vision libraries give better results when provided with raw (unprocessed) images.
Edit (after question update):
There multiple ways to do so. The first one that I would test is this: Your first binary image is pretty clean and sharp. Instead of of using morphological operations that reduce quality of letters switch to filtering contours. Use findContours function to find all contours in the image and store their hierarchy (i.e. which contour is inside which). From all the found contours you actually need only the contours on first and second levels, i.e. outer and inner contours of each letter (contours at zero level are the outermost contours). Other contours can be discarded. Among the contours that do belong to first level you can discard those whose bounding box is too small to be a real letter. After those two discarding procedures I would expect that most of the remaining contours are the ones that are parts of the letters. Draw them on white image and run OCR. (If you want white letters on black background you will need to invert the order of vertices in the contours).
I am looking for an efficient way to detect the small boxes around the numbers (see images)?
I already tried to use hough transformation with no success. Any ideas? I need some hints! I am using opencv...
For inspiration, you can have a look at the
Matlab video sudoku solver demo and explanation
Sudoku Grab, an Iphone App, whose author explains the computer vision part on his blog
Alternatively, if you are always hunting for the same grid you could deploy something like this:
Make a perfect artificial template of the grid and detect or save all coordinates from all corners.
In the target image, do the same thing, for example with Harris points. Be creative, you might also be able to use the distinct triangles that can be found in your images.
Using the coordinates from the template and the found harris points, determine the affine transformation x = Ax' between the template and the target image. That transformation can then be used to map the template grid onto the target image. At the very least this will give you some prior information to help guide further segmentation.
The gist of the idea and examples of the estimation of affine matrix A can be found on the site of Zissermans book Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision and Peter Kovesi
I'd start by trying to detect the rectangular boundary of the overall sheet, then applying a perspective transform to make it truly rectangular. Crop that portion of the image out. If possible, then try to make the alternating white and grey sub-rectangles have an equal background brightness - maybe try adaptive histogram equalization.
Then the Hough transform might perform better. Alternatively, you could then take an approach that's broadly similar to this demonstration by Robert Bemis on MATLAB Central (it's analysing a DNA microarray image rather than Lotto cards, but it's essentially finding bounding boxes of items arranged in a grid). At a high level, the approach is to calculate the autocorrelation along columns and rows of pixels to detect the periodicity of the items in the grid, and use that to impose a bounding box on each item.
Sorry the above advice is mostly MATLAB-based; I'm afraid I'm not an opencv user, but hopefully it will give you some ideas at least.
What are the ways in which to quantify the texture of a portion of an image? I'm trying to detect areas that are similar in texture in an image, sort of a measure of "how closely similar are they?"
So the question is what information about the image (edge, pixel value, gradient etc.) can be taken as containing its texture information.
Please note that this is not based on template matching.
Wikipedia didn't give much details on actually implementing any of the texture analyses.
Do you want to find two distinct areas in the image that looks the same (same texture) or match a texture in one image to another?
The second is harder due to different radiometry.
Here is a basic scheme of how to measure similarity of areas.
You write a function which as input gets an area in the image and calculates scalar value. Like average brightness. This scalar is called a feature
You write more such functions to obtain about 8 - 30 features. which form together a vector which encodes information about the area in the image
Calculate such vector to both areas that you want to compare
Define similarity function which takes two vectors and output how much they are alike.
You need to focus on steps 2 and 4.
Step 2.: Use the following features: std() of brightness, some kind of corner detector, entropy filter, histogram of edges orientation, histogram of FFT frequencies (x and y directions). Use color information if available.
Step 4. You can use cosine simmilarity, min-max or weighted cosine.
After you implement about 4-6 such features and a similarity function start to run tests. Look at the results and try to understand why or where it doesnt work. Then add a specific feature to cover that topic.
For example if you see that texture with big blobs is regarded as simmilar to texture with tiny blobs then add morphological filter calculated densitiy of objects with size > 20sq pixels.
Iterate the process of identifying problem-design specific feature about 5 times and you will start to get very good results.
I'd suggest to use wavelet analysis. Wavelets are localized in both time and frequency and give a better signal representation using multiresolution analysis than FT does.
Thre is a paper explaining a wavelete approach for texture description. There is also a comparison method.
You might need to slightly modify an algorithm to process images of arbitrary shape.
An interesting approach for this, is to use the Local Binary Patterns.
Here is an basic example and some explanations : http://hanzratech.in/2015/05/30/local-binary-patterns.html
See that method as one of the many different ways to get features from your pictures. It corresponds to the 2nd step of DanielHsH's method.