Photoshop Drop Shadow style in GLSL - opengl

I am trying to implement Adobe Photoshop's Drop Shadow layer style in OpenGL. I need to add a blurriness to the edges of the shadow which is controlled by "Size" property in Photoshop.I first thought that running it through a typical Gaussian blur algo would be fine.But looking closer at the effect it is clear to me that the Gaussian blur wouldn't give the same effect as it processes all the fragments of the raster uniformly.In Photoshop the Blur areas are always along the edges of the shadow shape.Those get wider towards the center of the shape.Anyone can point to an algorithm or GLSL example which blurs the shape on its edges based on the size parameter just like in Photoshop ?
UPDATE: Here is my final result using Euclidian Distance field and the technique outlined in
this Valve paper + the recent book "OpenGL Insights":

I am very interested in this answer as well, since I am trying to replicate the Photoshop Layer Styles in my open source project:
https://github.com/vinniefalco/LayerEffects
This is what I know:
Drop Shadow and Inner Shadow are duals of each other. Adding a drop shadow on a layer is the same as adding an Inner Shadow to a layer with an inverted mask.
Outer Glow with Technique set to "Precise" calculates a Euclidean Distance Transform (EDT) with a Chamfer metric.
Stroke set to Gradient, "Shape Burst" uses an identical EDT.
Outer Glow with Technique set to "Softer" uses some unknown transform identical to the one used for Drop Shadow.
Since the distance transform plays a key role in almost every Photoshop Layer Style, it might be reasonable to assume that the unknown transform in Drop Shadow is a variation of the EDT. The only other variation I have been able to find is called the "Gaussian Distance Transform" (GDT). Unfortunately there is only one description of it, in the book "2-D and 3-D Image Registration for Medical, Remote Sensing, and Industrial Applications." The PDF is available:
http://read.pudn.com/downloads85/ebook/327739/Wiley%5B1%5D.Interscience.2-D.and.3-D.Image.Registration.for.Medical.Remote.Sensing.and.Industrial.Applications.pdf
Here's the description of the GDT:
If we convolve an image with a monotonically increasing radial function, an image will be obtained that functions like a distance transform image. The inverse of a Gaussian may be used as the monotonically increasing radial function. Therefore, to obtain the distance transform of an image, the image is convolved with a Gaussian and the intensities of the convolved image are inverted. Computation of the distance transform in this manner makes the obtained distances less sensitive to noise. This is demonstrated in an example in Fig.4.6. Figures4.6a and 4.6b show distance transforms of images4.5a and 4.5b, respectively, computed by Gaussian convolution. Compared to the Euclidean distance transform, the distance transform computed by Gaussian convolution is less sensitive to noise.
Given this image:
(source: imgfsr.com)
Here's the signed Euclidean Distance Transform and the signed Gaussian Distance Transform:
(source: imgfsr.com)
(Images from http://www.imgfsr.com/ifsr_dtg.html)

Related

Get HU values along a trajectory volume

So, what I am trying to do is to calculate the density profile (HU) along a trajectory (represented by target x,y,z and tangent to it) in a CT. At the moment, I am able to get the profile along a line passing through the target and at a certain distance from the target (entrance). What I would like to do is to get the density profile for a volume (cylinder in this case) of width 1mm or so.
I guess I have to do interpolation of some sort along voxels since depending on the spacing between successive coordinates, several coordinates can point to the same index. For example, this is what I am talking about.
Additionally, I would like to get the density profile for different shapes of the tip of the trajectory, for example:
My idea is that I make a 3 by 3 matrix, representing the shapes of the tip, and convolve this with the voxel values to get HU values corresponding to the tip. How can I do this using ITK/VTK?
Kindly let me know if you need some more information. (I hope the images are clear enough).
If you want to calculate the density drill tip will encounter, it is probably easiest to create a mask of the tip's cutting surface in a resolution higher than your image. Define a transform matrix M which puts your drill into the wanted position in the CT image.
Then iterate through all the non-zero voxels in the mask, transform indices to physical points, apply transform M to them, sample (evaluate) the value in the CT image at that point using an interpolator, multiply it by the mask's opacity (in case of non-binary mask) and add the value to the running sum.
At the end your running sum will represent the total encountered density. This density sum will be dependent on the resolution of your mask of the tip's cutting surface. I don't know how you will relate it to some physical quantity (like resisting force in Newtons).
To get a profile along some path, you would use resample filter. Set up a transform matrix which transforms your starting point to 0,0,0 and your end point to x,0,0. Set the size of the target image to x,1,1 and spacing the same as in source image.
I don't understand your second question. To get HU value at the tip, you would sample that point using a high quality interpolator (example using linear interpolator). I don't get why would the shape of the tip matter.

GPU-Computation (CUDA) tex2d/tex3d - How to deal with anisotropic pixel/voxel

I am quite new to cuda programming and i have a question about the texXD function. My goal is to implement a simple GPU-based ray tracer using the optimized CUDA functionality.
See CUDA texture API that is used by NVIDIA.
At my research I have to deal with images that have a different resolution for every dimension (like CT images, (x,y) have a different resolution as (z)). Resampling to an isotropic pixel/voxel size might bring up some problems (especially for medical diagnosis).
For example i have an image with size (100px x 50px) and a resolution of (2px/mm x 1px/mm). The ray enters the image at an arbitrary point and leaves is somewhere else. The ray is sampled in the direction form entrance to leaving point. At each sample point (pos.x,pos.y) the tex2D function carries out an (bicubicbilinear) interpolation taking the neighbour pixel values into account weighted by their distance from the sample point.
example image:
In both shapes the corner points are named the same way(x1,y1),.... The only difference is the physical space between the corner points. The interpolation point is (x,y). I computed an example using the formula for rectangular grids and yield a different results for both grids. But if I use the ratio of areas of the numbered rectangles I got a different result.
My Question: Will CUDA take care of the different resolutions of the dimensions or does CUDA see all pixel in the same distance (and therefore as a squared grid)?
The formula used by CUDA seems to be the one for a squared grid (google:CUDA Texture fetching).
Or can I resample the image to squared grid before using tex2D without a substantial information loss?
Any suggestions are recommended. If you need some more clarification, feel free to ask. I will specifiy my question.
I don't believe what (I think it is) you are trying to do can be achieved using textures. The sole filtering mode supported using textures is described here.
Some salient points:
Textures don't have resolution. The just have dimensions.
Textures data is implicitly uniformly spaced in all dimensions.
Texture interpolation is done in a reduced accuracy fixed point arithmetic format which gives 8 bits of representational accuracy
None of this seems like anything that would be useful for the interpolation on a non-uniform grid which you are describing. At a minimum you would need to perform a coordinate transformation before you could use the uniform filtering mode. The amount of effort and expense would be about the same as just writing an interpolation routine yourself in user code.

computing likelihood of pixel belonging to an object using gradient orientation

I am working on object estimation on a image, that is tracking. Basically, I use gradient orientation as a feature descriptor of each pixel. I compute the gradient of each pixel and bin the orientation into 9-bin histogram therefore each pixel in the image is represented by a 9-dimension vector.
At initialization step a static foreground and background models are constructed as above.
Now the problem I have is that the background and the foreground are composed of many pixels (say k), therefore I will k x 9 dimension histograms for each pixels. How can I compute the likelihood of each pixel such that I can determine if it belongs to the foreground or background.
If the background and foreground models are constructed using a single histogram than it I can use something like compareHist in opencv. However the tracking result is very poor so I want to work at the pixel level. I cannot think of an appropriate method to compute probabilities for the method I stated above.
Is there any efficient way to do this? One way is to do One vs All (in the model) comparison but this is too exhaustive search approach and is computationally expensive.

Qt: how do I make a field of 2d-interpolated colors?

I'm quite a beginner with c++, especially graphically related.
I would like to make an animated background for my graphicsview which looks kind of like this:
Gradient Field Airflow
The picture represents the turbulence of an airflow over an object.
The colors must be based on a matrix of values.
I can only find how to do single-direction gradients with QT.
How do I set this up? How do I get two-directional gradients?
/*edit
It has been pointed out well that technically speaking this is not a gradient, but an color interpolation on a 2d array of nodes.
*/
Well you have not provided the input data so no one knows what you really want to achieve !
if you have the flow trajectories and mass
Then you can use some particle system + heavy blurring/smoothing filtering to achieve this. For any known point along the trajectory plot a dithered circle with color depend on the mass/temp/velocity... and color scale. It should be solid in the middle and transparent on the edges. After rendering just blur/smooth the image few times and that should be it. The less points used the bigger the circles must be to cover the area nicely also can do it in multi pass and change the points coordinates randomly to improve randomness in the image...
if you have field strength/speed/temp or what ever grid values
Then it is similar to #1 also you can instead of particle system do the rendering via QUADs/Squares. The 2D linear gradient is called Bilinear Filtering
c00 -- x --> c01
|
|
y c(x,y)
|
|
V
c10 c11
where:
c00,c01,c10,c11 are corner colors
c(x,y) is color on x,y position inside square
x,y are in range <0,1> for simplicity (but you can use any with appropriate equations scaling)
Bilinear interpolation is 3x linear interpolation:
c0=c(x,0)=c00+((c01-c00)*x)
c1=c(x,1)=c10+((c11-c10)*x)
c(x,y) =c0 +((c1 -c0 )*y)
so render all pixels of the square with above computed colors and that is what you seek. This kind of filtering usually produce artifacts on the edges between squares or on diagonals to avoid that use non linear filtering or blur/smooth the final image
There is a tutorial on gradients in Qt: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/demos-gradients.html and a class: http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/docs/library/html/qt4/qgradient.html I have never used other than linear gradients and according to the docs, it seems there are only three basic types of gradients available in Qt: linear, radial and conical. If you cannot compose your desired gradient using these three types, then I am afraid you will need to program your image pixels by yourself. Not to forget, it might be worthy to explore if OpenGL somehow could help. Qt has some classes using OpenGL but I am not familiar with them to provide more advice.

How to verify that the camera calibration is correct? (or how to estimate the error of reprojection)

The quality of calibration is measured by the reprojection error (is there an alternative?), which requires a knowledge world coordinates of some 3d point(s).
Is there a simple way to produce such known points? Is there a way to verify the calibration in some other way (for example, Zhang's calibration method only requires that the calibration object be planar and the geometry of the system need not to be known)
You can verify the accuracy of the estimated nonlinear lens distortion parameters independently of pose. Capture images of straight edges (e.g. a plumb line, or a laser stripe on a flat surface) spanning the field of view (an easy way to span the FOV is to rotate the camera keeping the plumb line fixed, then add all the images). Pick points on said line images, undistort their coordinates, fit mathematical lines, compute error.
For the linear part, you can also capture images of multiple planar rigs at a known relative pose, either moving one planar target with a repeatable/accurate rig (e.g. a turntable), or mounting multiple planar targets at known angles from each other (e.g. three planes at 90 deg from each other).
As always, a compromise is in order between accuracy requirements and budget. With enough money and a friendly machine shop nearby you can let your fantasy run wild with rig geometry. I had once a dodecahedron about the size of a grapefruit, machined out of white plastic to 1/20 mm spec. Used it to calibrate the pose of a camera on the end effector of a robotic arm, moving it on a sphere around a fixed point. The dodecahedron has really nice properties in regard to occlusion angles. Needless to say, it's all patented.
The images used in generating the intrinsic calibration can also be used to verify it. A good example of this is the camera-calib tool from the Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit (MRPT).
Per Zhang's method, the MRPT calibration proceeds as follows:
Process the input images:
1a. Locate the calibration target (extract the chessboard corners)
1b. Estimate the camera's pose relative to the target, assuming that the target is a planar chessboard with a known number of intersections.
1c. Assign points on the image to a model of the calibration target in relative 3D coordinates.
Find an intrinsic calibration that best explains all of the models generated in 1b/c.
Once the intrinsic calibration is generated, we can go back to the source images.
For each image, multiply the estimated camera pose with the intrinsic calibration, then apply that to each of the points derived in 1c.
This will map the relative 3D points from the target model back to the 2D calibration source image. The difference between the original image feature (chessboard corner) and the reprojected point is the calibration error.
MRPT performs this test on all input images and will give you an aggregate reprojection error.
If you want to verify a full system, including both the camera intrinsics and the camera-to-world transform, you will probably need to build a jig that places the camera and target in a known configuration, then test calculated 3D points against real-world measurements.
On Engine's question: the pose matrix is a [R|t] matrix where R is a pure 3D rotation and t a translation vector. If you have computed a homography from the image, section 3.1 of Zhang's Microsoft Technical Report (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/zhang/Papers/TR98-71.pdf) gives a closed form method to obtain both R and t using the known homography and the intrinsic camera matrix K. ( I can't comment, so I added as a new answer)
Should be just variance and bias in calibration (pixel re-projection) errors given enough variability in calibration rig poses. It is better to visualize these errors rather than to look at the values. For example, error vectors pointing to the center would be indicative of wrong focal length. Observing curved lines can give intuition about distortion coefficients.
To calibrate the camera one has to jointly solve for extrinsic and intrinsic. The latter can be known from manufacturer, the solving for extrinsic (rotation and translation) involves decomposition of calculated homography: Decompose Homography matrix in opencv python
Calculate a Homography with only Translation, Rotation and Scale in Opencv
The homography is used here since most calibration targets are flat.