Background
I want to detect all contours in an image that contains 2D geometric shapes, but strip away anything that looks like text.
Example input:
I tried to detect text areas via Tesseract and remove those text areas subsequently. For some images where the OCR recognition is good this works fine, thus text areas are recognized with quite good rate and contours of recognized text can then be removed. But for most images the text is not recognized well and thus I cannot remove irrelevant text contours from the image.
Therefore my question is: How can I distinguish text-like contours from my 2D "geometric" contours?
If you don't care about the text and just want to get rid of it, then you can just detect outer contours by passing RETR_EXTERNAL as the mode parameter to the findCountours() function. That will give you the outermost contours and ignore anything contained inside of the geometric shapes.
Or if you want more control, you can pass the mode parameter as RETR_TREE and then walk the tree, keeping only the top-level contours and ignoring anything below that level in the hierarchy. That way you'll get everything and you can decide later what you want to keep and what you want to ignore.
Read this page of the OpenCV documentation for information on how findCountours() represents the hierarchy (that page is from a python tutorial, but it's generic enough to follow along).
Of course that will only work if the images always look similar to the example you gave in your question - i.e. the text is always inside of the geometric shapes. If you have text outside of the shapes, then maybe you could look at the size of the contours (bounding rectangles) and ignore anything that falls below a certain threshhold (assuming text contours will be much smaller than your geometric shapes).
Contours that belong to text, also represent a region according to your example. So that you can try to use the properties of regions to eliminate some unneeded regions (text contours!) I can suggest that you can use some properties like eccentricity, solidity or compactness (you can find code example here: https://github.com/mribrahim/Blob-Detection
)
For ex: Regular shapes and the others can be distinguished by using compactness value, or you can combine any other properties
Related
I have an application where I have to detect the presence of some items in a scene. The items can be rotated and a little scaled (bigger or smaller). I've tried using keypoint detectors but they're not fast and accurate enough. So I've decided to first detect edges in the template and the search area, using Canny ( or a faster edge detection algo ), and then match the edges to find the position, orientation, and size of the match found.
All this needs to be done in less than a second.
I've tried using matchTemplate(), and matchShape() but the former is NOT scale and rotation invariant, and the latter doesn't work well with the actual images. Rotating the template image in order to match is also time consuming.
So far I have been able to detect the edges of the template but I don't know how to match them with the scene.
I've already gone through the following but wasn't able to get them to work (they're either using old version of OpenCV, or just not working with other images apart from those in the demo):
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/99457/Edge-Based-Template-Matching
Angle and Scale Invariant template matching using OpenCV
https://answers.opencv.org/question/69738/object-detection-kinect-depth-images/
Can someone please suggest me an approach for this? Or a code snipped for the same if possible ?
This is my sample input image ( the parts to detect are marked in red )
These are some software that are doing this and also how I want it should be:
This topic is what I am actually dealing for a year on a project. So I will try to explain what my approach is and how I am doing that. I assume that you already did the preprocess steps(filters,brightness,exposure,calibration etc). And be sure you clean the noises on image.
Note: In my approach, I am collecting data from contours on a reference image which is my desired object. Then I am comparing these data with the other contours on the big image.
Use canny edge detection and find the contours on reference
image. You need to be sure here about that it shouldn't miss some parts of
contours. If it misses, probably preprocess part should have some
problems. The other important point is that you need to find an
appropriate mode of findContours because every modes have
different properties so you need to find an appropriate one for your
case. At the end you need to eliminate the contours which are okey
for you.
After getting contours from reference, you can find the length of
every contours using outputArray of findContours(). You can compare
these values on your big image and eliminate the contours which are
so different.
minAreaRect precisely draws a fitted, enclosing rectangle for
each contour. In my case, this function is very good to use. I am
getting 2 parameters using this function:
a) Calculate the short and long edge of fitted rectangle and compare the
values with the other contours on the big image.
b) Calculate the percentage of blackness or whiteness(if your image is
grayscale, get a percentage how many pixel close to white or black) and
compare at the end.
matchShape can be applied at the end to the rest of contours or you can also apply to all contours(I suggest first approach). Each contour is just an array so you can hold the reference contours in an array and compare them with the others at the end. After doing 3 steps and then applying matchShape is very good on my side.
I think matchTemplate is not good to use directly. I am drawing every contour to a different mat zero image(blank black surface) as a template image and then I compare with the others. Using a reference template image directly doesnt give good results.
OpenCV have some good algorithms about finding circles,convexity etc. If your situations are related with them, you can also use them as a step.
At the end, you just get the all data,values, and you can make a table in your mind. The rest is kind of statistical analysis.
Note: I think the most important part is preprocess part. So be sure about that you have a clean almost noiseless image and reference.
Note: Training can be a good solution for your case if you just want to know the objects exist or not. But if you are trying to do something for an industrial application, this is totally wrong way. I tried YOLO and haarcascade training algorithms several times and also trained some objects with them. The experiences which I get is that: they can find objects almost correctly but the center coordinates, rotation results etc. will not be totally correct even if your calibration is correct. On the other hand, training time and collecting data is painful.
You have rather bad image quality very bad light conditions, so you have only two ways:
1. To use filters -> binary threshold -> find_contours -> matchShape. But this very unstable algorithm for your object type and image quality. You will get a lot of wrong contours and its hard to filter them.
2. Haarcascades -> cut bounding box -> check the shape inside
All "special points/edge matching " algorithms will not work in such bad conditions.
I am attempting to use OpenCV to detect "splotchy" lines in a binary image. I have an image like the one below and would like to robustly detect the three roughly vertical lines of splotches. HoughLines does a decent job, but often fails if only a few of the white pixels in the splotches are perfectly colinear. I've also tried Generalized Hough transform functions, but they aren't much better.
What I would like to be able to do is have HoughLines perform the Hough transform and give me the image in the Hough space (where each pixel value represents the votes for a particular rho and theta). That way I could look for high density regions instead of peaks, as those regions may better represent the lines I'm looking for.
I can't seem to find a way to get the raw Hough space image however. Is it possible?
Are there better ways to detect splotchy lines like this?
As a side note, I would like to do this all on a GPU, so functions with a 'cv::cuda::` api would be best.
I have written an algorithm to process a camera capture and extract a binary image of two features I'm interested in. I'm trying to find the best (fastest) way of detecting when the two features intersect and where the lowest (y coordinate is greatest) point is (this will be the intersection).
I do not want to use a findContours() based method as this is too slow and, in my opinion, unnecessary. I also think blob detection libraries are too bloated for this.
I have two sample images (sorry for low quality):
(not touching: http://i.imgur.com/7bQ9qMo.jpg)
(touching: http://i.imgur.com/tuSmKw7.jpg)
Due to the way these images are created, there is often noise in the top right corner which looks like pixelated lines but methods such as dilation and erosion lose resolution around the features I'm trying to find.
My initial thought would be to use direct pixel access to form a width filter and a height filter. The lowest point in the image is therefore the intersection.
I have no idea how to detect when they touch... logically I can see that a triangle is formed when they intersect and otherwise there is no enclosed black area. Can I fill the image starting from the corner with say, red, and then calculate how much of the image is still black?
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks
Your suggestion is a way more slow than finding contours. For binary images, finding contour is very easy and quick because you just need to find a black pixel followed by a white pixel or vice versa.
Anyway, if you don't want to use it, you can use the vertical projection or vertical profile you will see it the objects intersect or not.
For example, in the following image check the the letter "n" which is little similar to non-intersecting object, and the letter "o" which is similar to intersecting objects :
By analyzing the histograms you can recognize which one is intersecting or not.
Finding Circle Edges :
Here are the two sample images that i have posted.
Need to find the edges of the circle:
Does it possible to develop one generic circle algorithm,that could find all possible circles in all scenarios ?? Like below
1. Circle may in different color ( White , Black , Gray , Red)
2. Background color may be different
3. Different in its size
http://postimage.org/image/tddhvs8c5/
http://postimage.org/image/8kdxqiiyb/
Please suggest some idea to write a algorithm that should work out on above circle
Sounds like a job for the Hough circle transform:
I have not used it myself so far, but it is included in OpenCV. Among other parameters, you can give it a minimum and maximum radius.
Here are links to documentation and a tutorial.
I'd imagine your second example picture will be very hard to detect though
You could apply an edge detection transformation to both images.
Here is what I did in Paint.NET using the outline effect:
You could test edge detect too but that requires more contrast in the images.
Another thing to take into consideration is what it exactly is that you want to detect; in the first image, do you want to detect the white ring or the disc inside. In the second image; do you want to detect the all the circles (there are many tiny ones) or just the big one(s). These requirement will influence what transformation to use and how to initialize these.
After transforming the images into versions that 'highlight' the circles you'll need an algorithm to find them.
Again, there are more options than just one. Here is a paper describing an algoritm
Searching the web for image processing circle recognition gives lots of results.
I think you will have to use a couple of different feature calculations that can be used for segmentation. I the first picture the circle is recognizeable by intensity alone so that one is easy. In the second picture it is mostly the texture that differentiates the circle edge, in that case a feature image based based on some kind of texture filter will be needed, calculating the local variance for instance will result in a scalar image that can segment out the circle. If there are other features that defines the circle in other scenarios (different colors for background foreground etc) you might need other explicit filters that give a scalar difference for those cases.
When you have scalar images where the circles stand out you can use the circular Hough transform to find the circle. Either run it for different circle sizes or modify it to detect a range of sizes.
If you know that there will be only one circle and you know the kind of noise that will be present (vertical/horizontal lines etc) an alternative approach is to design a more specific algorithm e.g. filter out the noise and find center of gravity etc.
Answer to comment:
The idea is to separate the algorithm into independent stages. I do not know how the specific algorithm you have works but presumably it could take a binary or grayscale image where high values means pixel part of circle and low values pixel not part of circle, the present algorithm also needs to give some kind of confidence value on the circle it finds. This present algorithm would then represent some stage(s) at the end of the complete algorithm. You will then have to add the first stage which is to generate feature images for all kind of input you want to handle. For the two examples it should suffice with one intensity image (simply grayscale) and one image where each pixel represents the local variance. In the color case do a color transform an use the hue value perhaps? For every input feed all feature images to the later stage, use the confidence value to select the most likely candidate. If you have other unknowns that your algorithm need as input parameters (circle size etc) just iterate over the possible values and make sure your later stages returns confidence values.
i want to detect text area from image as a preprocessing step for tesseract OCR engine, the engine works well when the input is text only but when the input image contains Nontext content it falls, so i want to detect only text content in image,any idea of how to do that will be helpful,thanks.
Take a look at this bounding box technique demonstrated with OpenCV code:
Input:
Eroded:
Result:
Well, I'm not well-experienced in image processing, but I hope I could help you with my theoretical approach.
In most cases, text is forming parallel, horisontal rows, where the space between rows will contail lots of background pixels. This could be utilized to solve this problem.
So... if you compose every pixel columns in the image, you'll get a 1 pixel wide image as output. When the input image contains text, the output will be very likely to a periodic pattern, where dark areas are followed by brighter areas repeatedly. These "groups" of darker pixels will indicate the position of the text content, while the brighter "groups" will indicate the gaps between the individual rows.
You'll probably find that the brighter areas will be much smaller that the others. Text is much more generic than any other picture element, so it should be easy to separate.
You have to implement a procedure to detect these periodic recurrences. Once the script can determine that the input picture has these characteristics, there's a high chance that it contains text. (However, this approach can't distinguish between actual text and simple horisontal stripes...)
For the next step, you must find a way to determine the borderies of the paragraphs, using the above mentioned method. I'm thinking about a pretty dummy algorithm, witch would divide the input image into smaller, narrow stripes (50-100 px), and it'd check these areas separately. Then, it would compare these results to build a map of the possible areas filled with text. This method wouldn't be so accurate, but it probably doesn't bother the OCR system.
And finally, you need to use the text-map to run the OCR on the desired locations only.
On the other side, this method would fail if the input text is rotated more than ~3-5 degrees. There's another backdraw, beacuse if you have only a few rows, then your pattern-search will be very unreliable. More rows, more accuracy...
Regards, G.
I am new to stackoverflow.com, but I wrote an answer to a question similar to this one which may be useful to any readers who share this question. Whether or not the question is actually a duplicate, since this one was first, I'll leave up to others. If I should copy and paste that answer here, let me know. I also found this question first on google rather than the one i answered so this may benefit more people with a link. Especially since it provides different ways of going about getting text areas. For me, when I looked up this question, it did not fit my problem case.
Detect text area in an image using python and opencv
In the Current time, the best way to detect the text is by using EAST (An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector)
The EAST pipeline is capable of predicting words and lines of text at arbitrary orientations on 720p images, and furthermore, can run at 13 FPS, according to the authors.
EAST quick start tutorial can be found here
EAST paper can be found here