Below is a binary image in which I would like to detect the "hills", semicircles, cutouts.. In the image below in the red circle. The detection does not have to be precise, I just need to know that something like this is in the picture. I am thinking about the algorithm which would use kind of line sweep approach and count the black pixels on the line and evaluate that with some kind of "cleveristic", but before that I would like to know if I am missing any technique that would be easier or more robust. I have tried the HoughCircles, but with no good results, because the circles have quite huge radius and there is many of them (houghCircles takes grayscale image as input).
Counting pixels should be fine in this simple situation. If you face more complex scenarios with other things you don't want to count in, you should consider a blob detector.
This method searches for regions of connected pixels. Once you have blobs you can easily sort them by size, shape, position which helps to get rid of unwanted things.
https://www.learnopencv.com/blob-detection-using-opencv-python-c/
This is a very basic technique. Please read a book on image processing fundamentals befor you continue. It will make life much easier.
As #piglet said, this is a case of blob analysis.
If you want to further characterize and classify the defects, you have to compute some geometrical features of the shapes such as area, diameter, elungation... and feed them to a classifier/neural net.
Related
I've seen questions about detecting blurry images, but what about faded/grainy images. I have a large dataset of scanned passport-style portrait photos, and a number of them are old, hence looking faded and grainy (i.e hard to recognize the person).
Image quality metrics like BRISQUE and blur detection [link] didn't work so well and were inconsistent. The criteria for classification would be whether the photo was good enough for an average person to tell who the person was from the image.
So I tried face detection (HOG, etc), but it recognizes images where it's pretty much impossible to tell who the person is.
Ideally I'm looking for suggestions that is somewhat lightweight.
First idea I would check is image histograms. It's especially
straightforward in case of grayscale images. My assumption is
that quality photos have intensity distribution close to normal,
while grainy and faded photos do not. If histograms look similar
across images (looks like you have enough examples to check) in one
group it's easy to classify new image based on its histogram. You
can also consider counting histogram of image center's. Just area
containing eyes, nose and mouth. Low-quality images may loose this
details.
Another idea is to apply low-frequencies filter on image to remove
noise. Than count some metric based on some edge detector (Sobel,
Laplace, Canny, etc.) or just try to find any edges except one
around hair.
Another way is to average good images and compare this sample with
new ones. Higher difference will mean that observed image is not
typical portrait. Or try face-detection with cascade-based detector.
Or maybe some combination of this ideas will give a good result on your problem.
Sure it's possible to train a NN classifier, but I think it's possible to solve that specific problem without it.
I want to locate a service robot via infrared landmarks. The idea is to detect two landmarks, get the distance to the landmarks and calculate the robots position from these informations (the position of the landmarks are known).
For this I have built an artificial 2x3 matrix of IR LEDs, which are visible in the robots infrared camera image (shown in the image below).
As the first step, I want to detect a single landmark in a picture and get it's x-y coordinates. I can use these coordinates in the future to get the distance from the depth-image provided.
My first approach was to convert the image to a black and white image. Then I tried to filter out different cluster of points (which i dilated and contoured in the first place). I couldn't succeed with this method.
Now I wonder if there are any pattern recognition/computer vision methods which can help me to quite "easily" detect the pattern.
I've added a picture of the infrared image with the landmark in it and a converted black/white image.
a) Which method can help me to solve this problem?
b) Should I use a 3x3 Matrix or any other geometric form instead of the 2x3 Matrix ?
IR-Image
Black-White Image
A direct answer:
1) find all small circles in the image; 2) look among these small circles for ones that are the same size and close together, and, say, form parallel lines.
The reason for this approach is that you have coded the robot with a specific pattern of small objects. Therefore, look for the objects and then look for the pattern. (If the orientation and size wouldn't change, then you could just look for a sub-image within the larger image, but because it can, you need to look for elements of the pattern that remain consistent with motion in the 3D space, that is, the parallel lines.)
This will work in the example images, but to know whether this will work more generally, we need to know more than you told us: It depends on whether the variation in the images of the matrix and the variations in the background will let this be enough to distinguish between them. If not, maybe you need a more clever algorithm or maybe a different pattern of lights. In the extreme case, it's obvious that if you had another 2x3 matric around, it's not enough. It all depends on the variation of the object to be identified and the variations within the background scene, and because you don't tell us either of these things, it's hard to say the best way, what's good enough, what's a better way, etc.
If you have the choice, and here it sound like you do, good data is better than clever analysis. For this problem, I'd call good data to be anything that clearly distinguishes the object from the background. You need to think of it this way, and look at what the background is, and all the different perspectives on the lights that are possible, and make sure these can never be confused.
For example, if you have a lot of control over this, and enough time, temporal variations are often the easiest. Turning the lights (or a subset of the lights) on and off, etc, and then looking for the expected temporal variation is often the surest way to distinguish signal from noise — but really, this again is just making an assumption about the background and foreground (ie, that the background won't vary with some particular time pattern).
I have grayscale images like this:
I want to detect anomalies on this kind of images. On the first image (upper-left) I want to detect three dots, on the second (upper-right) there is a small dot and a "Foggy area" (on the bottom-right), and on the last one, there is also a bit smaller dot somewhere in the middle of the image.
The normal static tresholding does't work ok for me, also Otsu's method is always the best choice. Is there any better, more robust or smarter way to detect anomalies like this? In Matlab I was using something like Frangi Filtering (eigenvalue filtering). Can anybody suggest good processing algorithm to solve anomaly detection on surfaces like this?
EDIT: Added another image with marked anomalies:
Using #Tapio 's tophat filtering and contrast adjustement.
Since #Tapio provide us with great idea how to increase contrast of anomalies on the surfaces like I asked at the begining, I provide all you guys with some of my results. I have and image like this:
Here is my code how I use tophat filtering and contrast adjustement:
kernel = getStructuringElement(MORPH_ELLIPSE, Size(3, 3), Point(0, 0));
morphologyEx(inputImage, imgFiltered, MORPH_TOPHAT, kernel, Point(0, 0), 3);
imgAdjusted = imgFiltered * 7.2;
The result is here:
There is still question how to segment anomalies from the last image?? So if anybody have idea how to solve it, just take it! :) ??
You should take a look at bottom-hat filtering. It's defined as the difference of the original image and the morphological closing of the image and it makes small details such as the ones you are looking for flare out.
I adjusted the contrast to make both images visible. The anomalies are much more pronounced when looking at the intensities and are much easier to segment out.
Let's take a look at the first image:
The histogram values don't represent the reality due to scaling caused by the visualization tools I'm using. However the relative distances do. So now the thresholding range is much larger, the target changed from a window to a barn door.
Global thresholding ( intensity > 15 ) :
Otsu's method worked poorly here. It segmented all the small details to the foreground.
After removing noise by morphological opening :
I also assumed that the black spots are the anomalies you are interested in. By setting the threshold lower you include more of the surface details. For example the third image does not have any particularly interesting features to my eye, but that's for you to judge. Like m3h0w said, it's a good heuristic to know that if something is hard for your eye to judge it's probably impossible for the computer.
#skoda23, I would try unsharp masking with fine tuned parameters for the blurring part, so that the high frequencies get emphasized and test it thoroughly so that no important information is lost in the process. Remember that it is usually not good idea to expect computer to do super-human work. If a human has doubts about where the anomalies are, computer will have to. Thus it is important to first preprocess the image, so that the anomalies are obvious for the human eye. Alternative for unsharp masking (or addition) might be CLAHE. But again: remember to fine tune it very carefully - it might bring out the texture of the board too much and interfere with your task.
Alternative approach to basic thresholding or Otsu's, would be AdaptiveThreshold() which might be a good idea since there is a difference in intensity values between different regions you want to find.
My second guess would be first using fixed value thresholding for the darkest dots and then trying Sobel, or Canny. There should exist an optimal neighberhood where texture of the board will not shine as much and anomalies will. You can also try bluring before edge detection (if you've detected the small defects with the thresholding).
Again: it is vital for the task to experiment a lot on every step of this approach, because fine tuning the parameters will be crucial for eventual success. I'd recommend making friends with the trackbar, to speed up the process. Good luck!
You're basically dealing with the unfortunate fact that reality is analog. A threshold is a method to turn an analog range into a discrete (binary) range. Any threshold will do that. So what exactly do you mean with a "good enough" threshold?
Let's park that thought for a second. I see lots of anomalies - sort of thin grey worms. Apparently, you ignore them. I'm applying a different threshold then you are. This may be reasonable, but you're applying domain knowledge that I don't have.
I suspect these grey worms will be throwing off your fixed value thresholding. That's not to say the idea of a fixed threshold is bad. You can use it to find some artifacts and exclude those. Somewhat darkish patches will be missed, but can be brought out by replacing each pixel with the median value of its neighborhood, using a neighborhood size that's bigger than the width of those worms. In the dark patch, this does little, but it wipes out small local variations.
I don't pretend these two types of abnormalities are the only two, but that is really an application domain question and not about techniques. E.g. you don't appear to have ligthing artifacts (reflections), at least not in these 3 samples.
I've been using matplotlib.pyplot.contour to plot the contour of images, and I wonder how to implement the contour plotting, but I found that the code of pyplot.contour hard for me to understand. I have this idea that, for a grayscale image, each pixel has an intensity value, to plot its contour, I might choose a set of intensity values, like partition the range [min-intensity-value, max-intensity-value] to 10 segments [min-intensity-value, val0, val1,..., val8, max-intensity-value], then for each segment's boundary intensity value (like val0, val1,...,val8), find out all those pixels which has the same intensity value, and I think those pixels will form a contour line.
Is my idea a right way to go? Hope anyone can give me a basic idea about how to implement it.
Thanks.
Your idea of connecting all values with the same colour won't work, as there is no guarantee that these are connected. Also, consider e.g. the case of two equal-coloured pixels touching at the corner: There is no way to say whether these are connected or e.g. the other diagonal.
I believe the question is basically what you want to achieve. If you just want to vectorize the image, there are existing tools for that, like e.g. POtrace. If you need something special or have special input data, then you will get better results when you tell people about this. In that case, I would also take an hour or two to look up the very good description for the POtrace algorithm from their website, maybe you can borrow a few good ideas from it?
I am trying to do image detection in C++. I have two images:
Image Scene: 1024x786
Person: 36x49
And I need to identify this particular person from the scene. I've tried to use Correlation but the image is too noisy and therefore doesn't give correct/accurate results.
I've been thinking/researching methods that would best solve this task and these seem the most logical:
Gaussian filters
Convolution
FFT
Basically, I would like to move the noise around the images, so then I can use Correlation to find the person more effectively.
I understand that an FFT will be hard to implement and/or may be slow especially with the size of the image I'm using.
Could anyone offer any pointers to solving this? What would the best technique/algorithm be?
In Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class we did this exact problem using neural networks and a sliding window:
train a neural network to recognize the particular feature you're looking for using data with tags for what the images are, using a 36x49 window (or whatever other size you want).
for recognizing a new image, take the 36x49 rectangle and slide it across the image, testing at each location. When you move to a new location, move the window right by a certain number of pixels, call it the jump_size (say 5 pixels). When you reach the right-hand side of the image, go back to 0 and increment the y of your window by jump_size.
Neural networks are good for this because the noise isn't a huge issue: you don't need to remove it. It's also good because it can recognize images similar to ones it has seen before, but are slightly different (the face is at a different angle, the lighting is slightly different, etc.).
Of course, the downside is that you need the training data to do it. If you don't have a set of pre-tagged images then you might be out of luck - although if you have a Facebook account you can probably write a script to pull all of yours and your friends' tagged photos and use that.
A FFT does only make sense when you already have sort the image with kd-tree or a hierarchical tree. I would suggest to map the image 2d rgb values to a 1d curve and reducing some complexity before a frequency analysis.
I do not have an exact algorithm to propose because I have found that target detection method depend greatly on the specific situation. Instead, I have some tips and advices. Here is what I would suggest: find a specific characteristic of your target and design your code around it.
For example, if you have access to the color image, use the fact that Wally doesn't have much green and blue color. Subtract the average of blue and green from the red image, you'll have a much better starting point. (Apply the same operation on both the image and the target.) This will not work, though, if the noise is color-dependent (ie: is different on each color).
You could then use correlation on the transformed images with better result. The negative point of correlation is that it will work only with an exact cut-out of the first image... Not very useful if you need to find the target to help you find the target! Instead, I suppose that an averaged version of your target (a combination of many Wally pictures) would work up to some point.
My final advice: In my personal experience of working with noisy images, spectral analysis is usually a good thing because the noise tend to contaminate only one particular scale (which would hopefully be a different scale than Wally's!) In addition, correlation is mathematically equivalent to comparing the spectral characteristic of your image and the target.