So this should be straight forward but I a not very familiar with OpenCV.
Can someone suggest a method to measure the distance in pixels (red line) as shown in the image below? Preferably it had some options like width of measurement (as demonstrated at the end and begining of the red line) or something of sorts. This kind of measurement is very common in software like ImageJ, I can imagine it should be somewhat trivial to do it in OpenCV.
I would like to take several samples accros the image width as well.
Greets
I am using openCV and learning about it
Your task is quite simple.
optional smoothing (Gauss filter) - you have to experiment with your data to see if it helps
edge detection (will transform image to lines representing edges) - for example cv::Canny
Hough transform to detect lines - openCV.
Find two maximum values (longest lines) in Hough transform
you will have two questions of straight lines, then you can use this information to calculate distance between them
Note that whit this approach image doesn't have to be straight. You will have line equations which you have to manipulate in smart way. If those two lines are parallel this there is simple formula to get distance between them. If they are not perfectly parallel then you have to take this int account and use information about image area to get average distance.
A simple way to find the width of the channel would be the following:
distance = []
h = img.shape[0]
for j in range(img.shape[1]):
line_top = 0
line_bottom = img.shape[0]
found_top = False
found_bottom = False
for i in range(h):
if img[i,j,0] > 0 and not found_top:
line_top = i
found_top = True
if img[h-i-1,j,0] > 0 and not found_bottom:
line_bottom = h-i
found_bottom = True
if found_top and found_bottom:
distance.append(line_bottom-line_top)
break
But this would cause the distance to take into acount the very small white speckles.
To solve this there are several options:
Preprocess the image using opencv morphological transformation.
Preprocess the image using opencv gaussian filter or similar.
Update the code to use a larger window.
Another solution would be to apply opencv's findContours.
I have a dataset of a single class (rectangular object) with a size of 130 images. My goal is to detect the object & draw a circle/dot/mark in the centre of the object.
Because the objects are rectangular, my idea is to get the dimensions of the predicted bounding box and take the circle/dot/mark as (width/2, height/2).
However, if I were to do transfer learning, would YOLO be a good choice to detect a single class of objects in a small dataset?
YOLO should be fine. However it is old now. Try YoloV4 for better results.
People have tried transfer learning from FasterRCNN to detect single objects with 300 images and it worked fine. (Link). However 130 images is a bit smaller. Try augmenting images - flipping, rotating etc if you get inferior results.
Use same augmentation for annotation as well while doing translation, rotation, flip augmentations. For example in pytorch, for segmentation, I use:
if random.random()<0.5: # Horizontal Flip
image = T.functional.hflip(image)
mask = T.functional.hflip(mask)
if random.random()<0.25: # Rotation
rotation_angle = random.randrange(-10,11)
image = T.functional.rotate(image,angle = rotation_angle)
mask = T.functional.rotate(mask ,angle = rotation_angle)
For bounding box you will have to create coordinates, x becomes width-x for horizontal flip.
Augmentations where object position is not changing: do not change annotations e.g.: gamma intensity transformation
I have a highly reflective ball in an image that looks like this:
What is a robust method to detect the ball in real-time? (5-10 FPS)
I tried several segmentation algorithms, but they fail to separate the ball from the background and instead cut the ball into pieces, as there are many different areas on the ball itself.
Due to the reflective nature, a simple circular hough transform does not work well. The same goes for any simple treshhold or morphological operation.
Do you have any advice for handling reflective surfaces in general?
The HoughCircles suggestion is great, as long as you have a rough idea of how the ball will move in the frame and therefore roughly what minimum, maximum radius you account for:
import numpy as np
import cv2
import cv2.cv as cv
img = cv2.imread('wcEXm.jpg',0)
#Method 1: Hough Circles
img = cv2.medianBlur(img,5)
cimg = cv2.cvtColor(img,cv2.COLOR_GRAY2BGR)
# HoughCircles(image, method, dp, minDist[, circles[, param1[, param2[, minRadius[, maxRadius]]]]])
circles = cv2.HoughCircles(img,cv.CV_HOUGH_GRADIENT,dp=1,minDist=50,param1=127,param2=30,minRadius=50,maxRadius=150)
circles = np.uint16(np.around(circles))
for i in circles[0,:]:
# draw the outer circle
cv2.circle(cimg,(i[0],i[1]),i[2],(0,255,0),2)
# draw the center of the circle
cv2.circle(cimg,(i[0],i[1]),2,(0,0,255),3)
cv2.imshow('detected circles',cimg)
Another option is to use findContours(). With the right options and bit of filtering (e.g. dilate(), erode()) you can segment the ball from the background and the ratio between the width and height (closer to a square) will help.
However, there's one neat little thing that might simplify this a lot if you're not interested in the size of the ball, just knowing where it is.
You're ball is reflective and to even begin to detect you will need a source of light, therefore, even though colours/environments will look different, the ball will have a highlight. Assuming the source of light isn't in the frame, your reflective ball will probably be the next brightest thing in the scene:
import cv2
img = cv2.imread('wcEXm.jpg',0)
minVal, maxVal, minLoc, maxLoc = cv2.minMaxLoc(img)
cv2.circle(img, maxLoc, 20, (0,192,0),10)
In terms of performance on RaspberryPi, I recommend the following:
Use Adrian's tutorial on using PiCam with OpenCV in Python
If you plan to use minMaxLoc() or other functions that work with grayscale images you can use the 'yuv' colour space and simply use the Y (luminance) channel to save a bit of time not needing to convert from RGB to lumma/grayscale
Use a smaller resolution (e.g. 320x240 or 160x120). You can scale the result back up if you need to map the x,y position of the ball to something else.
Update:
Yet another thing that might help is Canny edge detection because the scene is simple and the ball will stand out:
edges = cv2.Canny(img,100,200)
I have an image here with a table.. In the column on the right the background is filled with noise
How to detect the areas with noise? I only want to apply some kind of filter on the parts with noise because I need to do OCR on it and any kind of filter will reduce the overall recognition
And what kind of filter is the best to remove the background noise in the image?
As said I need to do OCR on the image
I tried some filters/operations in OpenCV and it seems to work pretty well.
Step 1: Dilate the image -
kernel = np.ones((5, 5), np.uint8)
cv2.dilate(img, kernel, iterations = 1)
As you see, the noise is gone but the characters are very light, so I eroded the image.
Step 2: Erode the image -
kernel = np.ones((5, 5), np.uint8)
cv2.erode(img, kernel, iterations = 1)
As you can see, the noise is gone however some characters on the other columns are broken. I would recommend running these operations on the noisy column only. You might want to use HoughLines to find the last column. Then you can extract that column only, run dilation + erosion and replace this with the corresponding column in the original image.
Additionally, dilation + erosion is actually an operation called closing. This you could call directly using -
cv2.morphologyEx(img, cv2.MORPH_CLOSE, kernel)
As #Ermlg suggested, medianBlur with a kernel of 3 also works wonderfully.
cv2.medianBlur(img, 3)
Alternative Step
As you can see all these filters work but it is better if you implement these filters only in the part where the noise is. To do that, use the following:
edges = cv2.Canny(img, 50, 150, apertureSize = 3) // img is gray here
lines = cv2.HoughLinesP(edges, 1, np.pi / 180, 100, 1000, 50) // last two arguments are minimum line length and max gap between two lines respectively.
for line in lines:
for x1, y1, x2, y2 in line:
print x1, y1
// This gives the start coordinates for all the lines. You should take the x value which is between (0.75 * w, w) where w is the width of the entire image. This will give you essentially **(x1, y1) = (1896, 766)**
Then, you can extract this part only like :
extract = img[y1:h, x1:w] // w, h are width and height of the image
Then, implement the filter (median or closing) in this image. After removing the noise, you need to put this filtered image in place of the blurred part in the original image.
image[y1:h, x1:w] = median
This is straightforward in C++ :
extract.copyTo(img, new Rect(x1, y1, w - x1, h - y1))
Final Result with alternate method
Hope it helps!
My solution is based on thresholding to get the resulted image in 4 steps.
Read image by OpenCV 3.2.0.
Apply GaussianBlur() to smooth image especially the region in gray color.
Mask the image to change text to white and the rest to black.
Invert the masked image to black text in white.
The code is in Python 2.7. It can be changed to C++ easily.
import numpy as np
import cv2
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
# read Danish doc image
img = cv2.imread('./imagesStackoverflow/danish_invoice.png')
# apply GaussianBlur to smooth image
blur = cv2.GaussianBlur(img,(5,3), 1)
# threshhold gray region to white (255,255, 255) and sets the rest to black(0,0,0)
mask=cv2.inRange(blur,(0,0,0),(150,150,150))
# invert the image to have text black-in-white
res = 255 - mask
plt.figure(1)
plt.subplot(121), plt.imshow(img[:,:,::-1]), plt.title('original')
plt.subplot(122), plt.imshow(blur, cmap='gray'), plt.title('blurred')
plt.figure(2)
plt.subplot(121), plt.imshow(mask, cmap='gray'), plt.title('masked')
plt.subplot(122), plt.imshow(res, cmap='gray'), plt.title('result')
plt.show()
The following is the plotted images by the code for reference.
Here is the result image at 2197 x 3218 pixels.
As I know the median filter is the best solution to reduce noise. I would recommend to use median filter with 3x3 window. See function cv::medianBlur().
But be careful when use any noise filtration simultaneously with OCR. Its can lead to decreasing of recognition accuracy.
Also I would recommend to try using pair of functions (cv::erode() and cv::dilate()). But I'm not shure that it will best solution then cv::medianBlur() with window 3x3.
I would go with median blur (probably 5*5 kernel).
if you are planning to apply OCR the image. I would advise you to the following:
Filter the image using Median Filter.
Find contours in the filtered image, you will get only text contours (Call them F).
Find contours in the original image (Call them O).
isolate all contours in O that have intersection with any contour in F.
Faster solution:
Find contours in the original image.
Filter them based on size.
Blur (3x3 box)
Threshold at 127
Result:
If you are very worried of removing pixels that could hurt your OCR detection. Without adding artefacts ea be as pure to the original as possible. Then you should create a blob filter. And delete any blobs that are smaller then n pixels or so.
Not going to write code, but i know this works great as i use this myself, though i dont use openCV (i wrote my own multithreaded blobfilter out of speed reasons). And sorry but i cannot share my code here. Just describing how to do it.
If processing time is not an issue, a very effective method in this case would be to compute all black connected components, and remove those smaller than a few pixels. It would remove all the noisy dots (apart those touching a valid component), but preserve all characters and the document structure (lines and so on).
The function to use would be connectedComponentWithStats (before you probably need to produce the negative image, the threshold function with THRESH_BINARY_INV would work in this case), drawing white rectangles where small connected components where found.
In fact, this method could be used to find characters, defined as connected components of a given minimum and maximum size, and with aspect ratio in a given range.
I had already faced the same issue and got the best solution.
Convert source image to grayscale image and apply fastNlMeanDenoising function and then apply threshold.
Like this -
fastNlMeansDenoising(gray,dst,3.0,21,7);
threshold(dst,finaldst,150,255,THRESH_BINARY);
ALSO use can adjust threshold accorsing to your background noise image.
eg- threshold(dst,finaldst,200,255,THRESH_BINARY);
NOTE - If your column lines got removed...You can take a mask of column lines from source image and can apply to the denoised resulted image using BITWISE operations like AND,OR,XOR.
Try thresholding the image like this. Make sure your src is in grayscale. This method will only retain the pixels which are between 150 and 255 intensity.
threshold(src, output, 150, 255, CV_THRESH_BINARY | CV_THRESH_OTSU);
You might want to invert the image as you are trying to negate the gray pixels. After the operation, invert it again to get your desired result.
Current situation: I would like to detect rectangles (or squares) inside an image, where the contours of these rectangles are not solid consistent. Like a chessboard, where the outer contours have wholes.
Possible Solution: I am trying to implement an active contour algorithm, which should help me to detect the outside contour of the object. I know some points outside of the object, which could be used to shrink and fit the points as long as the object fits in it.
Search: I have found the cvSnakeImage Function of an older openCV version, which is not maintained and should not be used any more. I have found an active contour C++ implementation, which also uses an older openCV and the boost library. I have tried but was not able to build the code. HiDiYANG/ActiveContour
Post using cvSnake Implementation
Matlab porting to Opencv 3.0
Further articles in this topic: SNAKES: Active Contour Model
Question: Is there a current implementation of the active contour algorithm available in OpenCV? Is there a best implementation available, where I should invest time to understand the implementation?
Example Image:
I have the first image with the the points on the grey border and would like to get the red rectangle (second image).
For the image you have uplaoded, simple union over bounding boxes of contours should give you the result you desired. 'bb_union' is a function you need to write for yourself.
import cv2
img = cv2.imread('path to your image') # BGR image
im = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
im = 255 - im # your contours are black, so invert the image
_, contours, hierarchy = cv2.findContours(img, cv2.RETR_LIST, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE)
bb = None
for cnt in contours:
rect = cv2. boundingRect(cnt)
if (bb is None):
bb = rect
continue
bb = bb_union(rect, bb)
cv2.rectangle(img, bb, (0,0,255), 2)