I'm trying to detect a shape (a cross) in my input video stream with the help of OpenCV. Currently I'm thresholding to get a binary image of my cross which works pretty good. Unfortunately my algorithm to decide whether the extracted blob is a cross or not doesn't perform very good. As you can see in the image below, not all corners are detected under certain perspectives.
I'm using findContours() and approxPolyDP() to get an approximation of my contour. If I'm detecting 12 corners / vertices in this approximated curve, the blob is assumed to be a cross.
Is there any better way to solve this problem? I thought about SIFT, but the algorithm has to perform in real-time and I read that SIFT is not really suitable for real-time.
I have a couple of suggestions that might provide some interesting results although I am not certain about either.
If the cross is always near the center of your image and always lies on a planar surface you could try to find a homography between the camera and the plane upon which the cross lies. This would enable you to transform a sample image of the cross (at a selection of different in plane rotations) to the coordinate system of the visualized cross. You could then generate templates which you could match to the image. You could do some simple pixel agreement tests to determine if you have a match.
Alternatively you could try to train a Haar-based classifier to recognize the cross. This type of classifier is often used in face detection and detects oriented edges in images, classifying faces by the relative positions of several oriented edges. It has good classification accuracy on faces and is extremely fast. Although I cannot vouch for its accuracy in this particular situation it might provide some good results for simple shapes such as a cross.
Computing the convex hull and then taking advantage of the convexity defects might work.
All crosses should have four convexity defects, making up four sets of two points, or four vectors. Furthermore, if your shape was a cross then these four vectors will have two pairs of supplementary angles.
Related
I am using OpenCV's triangulatePoints function to determine 3D coordinates of a point imaged by a stereo camera.
I am experiencing that this function gives me different distance to the same point depending on angle of camera to that point.
Here is a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrYBhLJGiE4
In this video, we are tracking the 'X' mark. In the upper left corner info is displayed about the point that is being tracked. (Youtube dropped the quality, the video is normally much sharper. (2x1280) x 720)
In the video, left camera is the origin of 3D coordinate system and it's looking in positive Z direction. Left camera is undergoing some translation, but not nearly as much as the triangulatePoints function leads to believe. (More info is in the video description.)
Metric unit is mm, so the point is initially triangulated at ~1.94m distance from the left camera.
I am aware that insufficiently precise calibration can cause this behaviour. I have ran three independent calibrations using chessboard pattern. The resulting parameters vary too much for my taste. ( Approx +-10% for focal length estimation).
As you can see, the video is not highly distorted. Straight lines appear pretty straight everywhere. So the optimimum camera parameters must be close to the ones I am already using.
My question is, is there anything else that can cause this?
Can a convergence angle between the two stereo cameras can have this effect? Or wrong baseline length?
Of course, there is always a matter of errors in feature detection. Since I am using optical flow to track the 'X' mark, I get subpixel precision which can be mistaken by... I don't know... +-0.2 px?
I am using the Stereolabs ZED stereo camera. I am not accessing the video frames using directly OpenCV. Instead, I have to use the special SDK I acquired when purchasing the camera. It has occured to me that this SDK I am using might be doing some undistortion of its own.
So, now I wonder... If the SDK undistorts an image using incorrect distortion coefficients, can that create an image that is neither barrel-distorted nor pincushion-distorted but something different altogether?
The SDK provided with the ZED Camera performs undistortion and rectification of images. The geometry model is based on the same as openCV :
intrinsic parameters and distortion parameters for both Left and Right cameras.
extrinsic parameters for rotation/translation between Right and Left.
Through one of the tool of the ZED ( ZED Settings App), you can enter your own intrinsic matrix for Left/Right and distortion coeff, and Baseline/Convergence.
To get a precise 3D triangulation, you may need to adjust those parameters since they have a high impact on the disparity you will estimate before converting to depth.
OpenCV gives a good module to calibrate 3D cameras. It does :
-Mono calibration (calibrateCamera) for Left and Right , followed by a stereo calibration (cv::StereoCalibrate()). It will output Intrinsic parameters (focale, optical center (very important)), and extrinsic (Baseline = T[0], Convergence = R[1] if R is a 3x1 matrix). the RMS (return value of stereoCalibrate()) is a good way to see if the calibration has been done correctly.
The important thing is that you need to do this calibration on raw images, not by using images provided with the ZED SDK. Since the ZED is a standard UVC Camera, you can use opencv to get the side by side raw images (cv::videoCapture with the correct device number) and extract Left and RIght native images.
You can then enter those calibration parameters in the tool. The ZED SDK will then perform the undistortion/rectification and provide the corrected images. The new camera matrix is provided in the getParameters(). You need to take those values when you triangulate, since images are corrected as if they were taken from this "ideal" camera.
hope this helps.
/OB/
There are 3 points I can think of and probably can help you.
Probably the least important, but from your description you have separately calibrated the cameras and then the stereo system. Running an overall optimization should improve the reconstruction accuracy, as some "less accurate" parameters compensate for the other "less accurate" parameters.
If the accuracy of reconstruction is important to you, you need to have a systematic approach to reducing it. Building an uncertainty model, thanks to the mathematical model, is easy and can write a few lines of code to build that for you. Say you want to see if the 3d point is 2 meters away, at a particular angle to the camera system, and you have a specific uncertainty on the 2d projections of the 3d point, it's easy to backproject the uncertainty to the 3d space around your 3d point. By adding uncertainty to the other parameters of the system then you can see which ones are more important and need to have lower uncertainty.
This inaccuracy is inherent in the problem and the method you're using.
First if you model the uncertainty you will see the reconstructed 3d points further away from the center of cameras have a much higher uncertainty. The reason is that the angle <left-camera, 3d-point, right-camera> is narrower. I remember the MVG book had a good description of this with a figure.
Second, if you look at the implementation of triangulatePoints you see that the pseudo-inverse method is implemented using SVD to construct the 3d point. That can lead to many issues, which you probably remember from linear algebra.
Update:
But I consistently get larger distance near edges and several times
the magnitude of the uncertainty caused by the angle.
That's the result of using pseudo-inverse, a numerical method. You can replace that with a geometrical method. One easy method is to back-project the 2d-projections to get 2 rays in 3d space. Then you want to find where the intersect, which doesn't happen due to the inaccuracies. Instead you want to find the point where the 2 rays have the least distance. Without considering the uncertainty you will consistently favor a point from the set of feasible solutions. That's why with pseudo inverse you don't see any fluctuation but a gross error.
Regarding the general optimization, yes, you can run an iterative LM optimization on all the parameters. This is the method used in applications like SLAM for autonomous vehicles where accuracy is very important. You can find some papers by googling bundle adjustment slam.
I am currently reading into the topic of stereo vision, using the book of Hartley&Zimmerman alongside some papers, as I am trying to develop an algorithm capable of creating elevation maps from two images.
I am trying to come up with the basic steps for such an algorithm. This is what I think I have to do:
If I have two images I somehow have to find the fundamental matrix, F, in order to find the actual elevation values at all points from triangulation later on. If the cameras are calibrated this is straightforward if not it is slightly more complex (plenty of methods for this can be found in H&Z).
It is necessary to know F in order to obtain the epipolar lines. These are lines that are used in order to find image point x in the first image back in the second image.
Now comes the part were it gets a bit confusing for me:
Now I would start taking a image point x_i in the first picture and try to find the corresponding point x_i’ in the second picture, using some matching algorithm. Using triangulation it is now possible to compute the real world point X and from that it’s elevation. This process will be repeated for every pixel in the right image.
In the perfect world (no noise etc) triangulation will be done based on
x1=P1X
x2=P2X
In the real world it is necessary to find a best fit instead.
Doing this for all pixels will lead to the complete elevation map as desired, some pixels will however be impossible to match and therefore can't be triangulated.
What confuses me most is that I have the feeling that Hartley&Zimmerman skip the entire discussion on how to obtain your point correspondences (matching?) and that the papers I read in addition to the book talk a lot about disparity maps which aren’t mentioned in H&Z at all. However I think I understood correctly that the disparity is simply the difference x1_i- x2_i?
Is this approach correct, and if not where did I make mistakes?
Your approach is in general correct.
You can think of a stereo camera system as two points in space where their relative orientation is known. This are the optical centers. In front of each optical center, you have a coordinate system. These are the image planes. When you have found two corresponding pixels, you can then calculate a line for each pixel, wich goes throug the pixel and the respectively optical center. Where the two lines intersect, there is the object point in 3D. Because of the not perfect world, they will probably not intersect and one may use the point where the lines are closest to each other.
There exist several algorithms to detect which points correspond.
When using disparities, the two image planes need to be aligned such that the images are parallel and each row in image 1 corresponds to the same row in image 2. Then correspondences only need to be searched on a per row basis. Then it is also enough to know about the differences on x-axis of the single corresponding points. This is then the disparity.
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 am just starting to use OpenCV to detect specific curves in an image. First, I want to verify if there is a curve, and next, I would like to identify the type of curve according to vertical or horizontal convex or concave curve. Is there an available function in OpenCV? If not, can you give me some ideas about how can I possibly write such a function? Thanks! By the way, I'm using C++.
Template matching is not a robust way to solve this problem (its like looking at an object from a small pinhole) and edge detectors don't necessarily return you the true edges in the image; false edges such as those due to shadows are returned too. Further, you have to deal with the problem of incomplete edges and other problems that scales up with the complexity of the scene in your image.
The problem you posed, in general, is a very challenging one and, except for toy examples, there are no good solutions.
A rough attempt could be to first try to detect plausible edges using an edge detector (e.g. the canny edge detector suggested). Next, use RANSAC to try to fit a subset of the points in the detected edges to your curve model.
For e.g. let's say you are trying to detect a curve of the following form f(x) = ax^2 + bx + c. RANSAC will basically try to find from among the points in the detected edges, a subset of them that would best fit this curve model. To detect different curves, change f(x) accordingly and run RANSAC for each of them. You can then try to determine if the curve represented by f(x) really exists in your image using some heuristic applied to from the points that were assigned to it by RANSAC (e.g. if too few points were fitted to the model it is likely that the curve is not there. But how to determine a good threshold for the number of points?). You model will get more complex when you have to account for allowable transformation such as rotation etc.
The problem with this approach is you are basically trying fit what you think should be in the image to the points and sometimes, even if what you are looking for is not there, it will return you the "best possible" fit. For e.g. you have a whole bunch of points detected from a concentric circle. If you try to detect straight lines from these points, RANSAC will return you the best fit line! In fact, it could give you many different lines from different runs depending on which points it selected during its random initialization stage.
For more details on how to use RANSAC on this sort of problem, have a look at RANSAC for Dummies by Marco Zuliani. He also has a nice MATLAB toolbox to accompany this tech report, which you can probably port to the language of your choice.
Unless you know what you background looks like, or if you are in control of it e.g. by forcing a clean background, this is a very difficult problem to solve.
How to find shift and rotation between same two images using programming languages vb.net or C++ or C#?
The problem you state is called motion detection (or motion compensation) and is one of the most important problems in image and video processing at the moment. No easy "here are ten lines of code that will do it" solution exists except for some really trivial cases.
Even your seemingly trivial case is quite a difficult one because a rotation by an unknown angle could cause slight pixel-by-pixel changes that can't be easily detected without specifically tailored algorithms used for motion detection.
If the images are very similar such that the camera is only slightly moved and rotated then the problem could be solved without using highly complex techniques.
What I would do, in that case, is use a motion tracking algorithm to get the optical flow of the image sequence which is a "map" which approximates how a pixel has "moved" from image A to B. OpenCV which is indeed a very good library has functions that does this: CalcOpticalFlowLK and CalcOpticalFlowPyrLK.
The tricky bit is going from the optical flow to total rotation of the image. I would start by heavily low pass filter the optical flow to get a smoother map to work with.
Then you need to use some logic to test if the image is only shifted or rotated. If it is only shifted then the entire map should be one "color", i.e. all flow vectors point in the same direction.
If there has been a rotation then the vectors will point in different direction depending on the rotation.
If the input images are not as nice as the above method requires, then I would look into feature descriptors to find how a specific object in the first image is located within the second. This will however be much harder.
There is no short answer. You could try to use free OpenCV library for finding relationship between two images.
The two operations, rotation and translation can be determined in either order. It's far easier to first detect rotation, because you can then compensate for that. Once both images are oriented the same, the translation becomes a matter of simmple correlation.
Finding the relative rotation of an image is best done by determining the local gradients. For every neighborhood (e.g. 3x3 pixels), treat the greyvalue as a function z(x,y), fit a plane through the 9 pixels, and determine the slope or gradient of that plane. Now average the gradient you found over the entire image, or at least the center of it. Your two images will produce different averages. Part of that is because for non-90 degree rotations the images won't overlap fully, but in general the difference in average gradients is the rotation between the two.
Once you've rotated back one image, you can determine a correlation. This is a fairly standard operation; you're essentially determining for each possible offset how well the two images overlap. This will give you an estimate for the shift.
Once you've got both, you can refine your rotation angle estimate by rotating back the translation, shifting the second image, and determining the average gradient only over the pixels common to both images.
If the images are exactly the same, it should be fairly easy to extract some feature points - for example using SIFT - and match the features of both images. You can then use any two of the matching features to find the rotation and translation. The translation is just the difference between two matching feature points. The you compensate for the translation in one image and get the rotation angle as the angle formed by the three remaining points.