Product inspection with Computer vision - edge detection with opencv - c++

I am a new user of opencv. I am currently doing a project of performing product inspection with opencv. I was planning to extract edges of good product and the bad product then compare their edges maybe with mean square difference. However, it is already quite difficult to extract the edge clearly as the first step.
Good sample:Good product
[![enter image description here][1]][1]
When I use canny edge detection, the edge of the good product (the blue part of the picture) only includes part of the product and is as follows:
Edge of good product
[![enter image description here][2]][2]
I also tried to use adaptiveThreshold to make the greyscale picture more clear and then use the edge detection. But, the edge detected is not as good as expected because of many noise.
Therefore, I would like to ask for a solution of extracting the edge or any better way of comparing good product and bad product with opencv. Sorry for the bad english above.

This task can be made simple if some assumptions like those below are valid. For example:
Products move along the same production line, and therefore the lighting across all product images stays the same.
The products lie on a flat surface parallel to the focal plane of the camera, so the rotation of objects will be only around the axis of the lens.
The lighting can be controlled (this will help you to get better edges, and is actually used in production line image processing)
Since we cannot see the images that you added, it is a bit hard to see what exactly the situation is. But if the above assumptions are valid, image differencing combined with image signatures is one possible approach.
Another possibility is to train a Haar Cascade classifier using good and bad products. With this, the edges and all that will be taken care of. But you will have to collect a lot of data and train the classifier.

Related

Better model for classifying image quality (seperate sharp & well lit images from blurry/out of focus/grainy images)

I have a dataset of around 20K images that are human labelled. Labels are as follows:
Label = 1 if the image is sharp and well lit, and
Label = 0 for those blurry/out of focus/grainy images.
The images are of documents such as Identity cards.
I want to build a Computer Vision model that can do the classification task.
I tried using VGG-16 for transfer learning for this task but it did not give good results (precision .65 and recall = .73). My sense is that VGG-16 is not suitable for this task. It is trained on ImageNet and has very different low level features. Interestingly the model is under-fitting.
We also tried EfficientNet 7. Though the model was able to decently perform on training and validation, test performance remains bad.
Can someone suggest more suitable model to try for this task?
I think your problem with VGG and other NN is the resizing of images:
VGG expects as input 224x224 size image. I assume your dataset has much larger resolution, and thus you significantly downscale the input images before feeding them to your network.
What happens to blur/noise when you downscale an image?
Blurry and noisy images become sharper and cleaner as you decrease the resolution. Therefore, in many of your training examples, the net sees a perfectly good image while you label them as "corrupt". This is not good for training.
An interesting experiment would be to see what types of degradations your net can classify correctly and what types it fails: You report 65% precision # 73% recall. Can you look at the classified images at that point and group them by degradation type?
That is, what is precision/recall for only blurry images? what is it for noisy images? What about grainy images?
What can you do?
Do not resize images at all! if the network needs fixed size input - then crop rather than resize.
Taking advantage of the "resizing" effect, you can approach the problem using a "discriminator". Train a network that "discriminate" between an image and its downscaled version. If the image is sharp and clean - this discriminator will find it difficult to succeed. However, for blurred/noisy images the task should be rather easy.
For this task, I think using opencv is sufficient to solve the issue. In fact comparing the variance of Lablacien of the image with a threshold (cv2.Laplacian(image, cv2.CV_64F).var()) will generate a decision if an image is bluered or not.
You ca find an explanation of the method and the code in the following tutorial : detection with opencv
I think that training a classifier that takes the output of one of one of your neural network models and the variance of Laplacien as features will improve the classification results.
I also recommend experementing with ResNet and DenseNet.
I would look at the change in color between pixels, then rank the photos on the median delta between pixels... a sharp change from RGB (0,0,0) to (255,255,255) on each of the adjoining pixels would be the max possible score, the more blur you have the lower the score.
I have done this in the past trying to estimate areas of fields with success.

How to detect a grainy or faded image?

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.

What is the best method to train the faces with FaceRecognizer OpenCV to have the best result?

Here I say that I have tried many tutorials to implement face recognition in OpenCV 3.2 by using the FaceRecognizer class in face module. But I did not get the accepted result as I wish.
Here I want to ask and I want to know, that what is the best way or what are the conditions to be care off during training and recognizing?
What I have done to improve the accuracy:
Create (at least) 10 faces for training each person in the best quality, size, and angle.
Try to fit the face in the image.
Equalize the HIST of the images
And then I have tried all the three face recognizer (EigenFaceRecognizer, FisherFaceRecognizer, LBPHFaceRecognizer), the result all was the same, but the recognition rate was really very low, I have trained only for three persons, but also cannot recognize very well (the fist person was recognized as the second and so on problems).
Questions:
Do the training and the recognition images must be from the same
camera?
Do the training images cropped manually (photoshop -> read images then train) or this task
must be done programmatically (detect-> crop-> resize then train)?
And what are the best parameters for the each face recognizer (int num_components, double threshold)
And how to set training Algorithm to return -1 when it is an unknown
person.
Expanding on my comment, Chapter 8 in Mastering OpenCV provides really helpful tips for pre-processing faces to make aid the recognition process, such as:
taking a sample only when both eyes are detected (via haar cascade)
Geometrical transformation and cropping: This process would include scaling, rotating, and translating the images so that the eyes are aligned, followed by the removal of the forehead, chin, ears, and background from the face image.
Separate histogram equalization for left and right sides: This process standardizes the brightness and contrast on both the left- and right-hand sides of the face independently.
Smoothing: This process reduces the image noise using a bilateral filter.
Elliptical mask: The elliptical mask removes some remaining hair and background from the face image.
I've added a hacky load/save to my fork of the example code, feel free to try it/tweak it as you need it. Currently it's very limited, but it's a start.
Additionally, you should also check OpenFace and it's DNN face recognizer.
I haven't played with that yet so can't provide details, but it looks really cool.

OpenCV detect image against a image set

I would like to know how I can use OpenCV to detect on my VideoCamera a Image. The Image can be one of 500 images.
What I'm doing at the moment:
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
[super viewDidLoad];
// Do any additional setup after loading the view.
self.videoCamera = [[CvVideoCamera alloc] initWithParentView:imageView];
self.videoCamera.delegate = self;
self.videoCamera.defaultAVCaptureDevicePosition = AVCaptureDevicePositionBack;
self.videoCamera.defaultAVCaptureSessionPreset = AVCaptureSessionPresetHigh;
self.videoCamera.defaultAVCaptureVideoOrientation = AVCaptureVideoOrientationPortrait;
self.videoCamera.defaultFPS = 30;
self.videoCamera.grayscaleMode = NO;
}
-(void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated{
[super viewDidAppear:animated];
[self.videoCamera start];
}
#pragma mark - Protocol CvVideoCameraDelegate
#ifdef __cplusplus
- (void)processImage:(cv::Mat&)image;
{
// Do some OpenCV stuff with the image
cv::Mat image_copy;
cvtColor(image, image_copy, CV_BGRA2BGR);
// invert image
//bitwise_not(image_copy, image_copy);
//cvtColor(image_copy, image, CV_BGR2BGRA);
}
#endif
The images that I would like to detect are 2-5kb small. Few got text on them but others are just signs. Here a example:
Do you guys know how I can do that?
There are several things in here. I will break down your problem and point you towards some possible solutions.
Classification: Your main task consists on determining if a certain image belongs to a class. This problem by itself can be decomposed in several problems:
Feature Representation You need to decide how you are gonna model your feature, i.e. how are you going to represent each image in a feature space so you can train a classifier to separate those classes. The feature representation by itself is already a big design decision. One could (i) calculate the histogram of the images using n bins and train a classifier or (ii) you could choose a sequence of random patches comparison such as in a random forest. However, after the training, you need to evaluate the performance of your algorithm to see how good your decision was.
There is a known problem called overfitting, which is when you learn too well that you can not generalize your classifier. This can usually be avoided with cross-validation. If you are not familiar with the concept of false positive or false negative, take a look in this article.
Once you define your feature space, you need to choose an algorithm to train that data and this might be considered as your biggest decision. There are several algorithms coming out every day. To name a few of the classical ones: Naive Bayes, SVM, Random Forests, and more recently the community has obtained great results using Deep learning. Each one of those have their own specific usage (e.g. SVM ares great for binary classification) and you need to be familiar with the problem. You can start with simple assumptions such as independence between random variables and train a Naive Bayes classifier to try to separate your images.
Patches: Now you mentioned that you would like to recognize the images on your webcam. If you are going to print the images and display in a video, you need to handle several things. it is necessary to define patches on your big image (input from the webcam) in which you build a feature representation for each patch and classify in the same way you did in the previous step. For doing that, you could slide a window and classify all the patches to see if they belong to the negative class or to one of the positive ones. There are other alternatives.
Scale: Considering that you are able to detect the location of images in the big image and classify it, the next step is to relax the toy assumption of fixes scale. To handle a multiscale approach, you could image pyramid which pretty much allows you to perform the detection in multiresolution. Alternative approaches could consider keypoint detectors, such as SIFT and SURF. Inside SIFT, there is an image pyramid which allows the invariance.
Projection So far we assumed that you had images under orthographic projection, but most likely you will have slight perspective projections which will make the whole previous assumption fail. One naive solution for that would be for instance detect the corners of the white background of your image and rectify the image before building the feature vector for classification. If you used SIFT or SURF, you could design a way of avoiding explicitly handling that. Nevertheless, if your input is gonna be just squares patches, such as in ARToolkit, I would go for manual rectification.
I hope I might have given you a better picture of your problem.
I would recommend using SURF for that, because pictures can be on different distances form your camera, i.e changing the scale. I had one similar experiment and SURF worked just as expected. But SURF has very difficult adjustment (and expensive operations), you should try different setups before you get the needed results.
Here is a link: http://docs.opencv.org/modules/nonfree/doc/feature_detection.html
youtube video (in C#, but can give an idea): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjxWpKCQqJc
I might not be qualified enough to answer this problem. Last time I seriously use OpenCV it was still 1.1. But just some thought on it, and hope it would help (currently I am interested in DIP and ML).
I think it will probably an easier task if you only need to classify an image, if the image is just one from (or very similar to) your 500 images. For this you could use SVM or some neural network (Felix already gave an excellent enumeration on that).
However, your problem seems to be that you need to first find this candidate image in your webcam, the location of which you have little clue beforehand. (let us know whether it is so. I think it is important.)
If so, the harder problem is the detection/localization of your candidate image.
I don't have a general solution for that. The first thing I would do is to see if there is some common feature in your 500 images (e.g., whether all of them enclosed by a red circle, or, half of them have circle and half of them have rectangle). If this can be done, the problem will be simpler (it would be similar to face detection problem, which have good solution).
In other words, this means that you first classify the 500 images to a few groups with common feature (by human), and detect the group first, then scale and use above mentioned technique to classify them into fine result. In this way, it will be more computationally acceptable than trying to detect 500 images one by one.
BTW, this ppt would help to give a visual clue of what is going on for feature extraction and image matching http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse455/09wi/Lects/lect6.pdf.
Detect vs recognize: detecting the image is just finding it on the background and from your comments I realized you may have your sings surrounded by the background. It might facilitate your algorithm if you can somehow crop your signs from the background (detect) before trying to recognize them. Recognizing is a next stage that presumes you can classify the cropped image correctly as the one seen before.
If you need real time speed and scale/rotation invariance neither SIFT no SURF will do this fast. Nowadays you can do much better if you shift the burden of image processing to a learning stage as was done by Lepitit. In short, he subjected each pattern to a bunch of affine transformations and trained a binary classification tree to recognize each point correctly by doing a lot of binary comparison tests. Trees are extremely fast and a way to go not to mention that most of the processing is done offline. This method is also more robust to off-plane rotations than SIFT or SURF. You will also learn about tree classification which may facilitate you last processing stage.
Finally a recognition stage is based not only on the number of matches but also on their geometric consistency. Since your signs look flat I suggest finding either affine or homography transformation that has most inliers when calculated between matched points.
Looking at your code though I realized that you may not follow any of these recommendations. It may be a good starting point for you to read about decision trees and then play with some sample code (see mushroom.cpp in the above mentioned link)

Target Detection - Algorithm suggestions

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.