RGB value encoded from height - c++

I have a program where I need to represent height as an RGBT (in float) value. That is:
[R, G, B, T (Transperancy)] -> [0.0f-1.0f, 0.0f-1.0f, 0.0f-1.0f, 0.0f-1.0f]
Conceptually I know that you can encode via basic height between max and min height. I even have some code for greyScale height encoding:
double Heightmin=0;
double Heightmax=23;
osg::Vec4 getColourFromHeight(double height, double alpha=1.0) {
double r=(height-Heightmin)/Heightmax;
double b=(height-Heightmin)/Heightmax;
double g=(height-Heightmin)/Heightmax;
return osg::Vec4(r, g, b, 1.0);
}
What I would like to know, is if there is an algorithm that's more complex then just using R and G like this:
double r=(height-Heightmin)/Heightmax;
double b=0.0f;
double g=(Heightmax- height + Heightmin)/Heightmax;
(That is, the G is the inverted form of R, so at low values it will appear more green and at high values it will appear more red.
I would like to be able to utilise R G and B to give realistic looking hieght encoded landscapes:
This is an image of a 72dpi RGB height encoded topographic map. I would like to be able to achive something similar to this. Is there a simple algorithm to create an RGB value based on a minimum and maximum hieght?
Thaks for your help.
Ben

You just need to come up with a suitable colour gradient that you like, and then put it in a lookup table (or similar).
Then all you need is something that will map a value in the range min_height -> max_height into the range 0 -> 255 (for example).
Of course, it's possible that you will find a colour gradient that can be expressed as mathematical functions, but that's less general.

Related

Compare intensity pixel value Vec3b in OpenCV

I have a 3 channel Mat image, type is CV_8UC3.
I want to compare, in a loop, the intensity value of a pixel with its neighbours and then set 0 or 1 if the neighbour is greater or not.
I can get the intensity calling Img.at<Vec3b>(x,y).
But my question is: how can I compare two Vec3b?
Should I compare pixels value for every channel (BGR or Vec3b[0], Vec3b[1] and Vec3b[2]), and then merge the three channels results into a single Mat object?
Me again :)
If you want to compare (greater or less) two RGB values you need to project the 3-dimensional RGB space onto a plane or axis.
Of course, there are many possibilities to do this, but an easy way would be to use the HSV color space. The hue (H), however, is not appropriate as a linear order function because it is circular (i.e. the value 1.0 is identical with 0.0, so you cannot decide if 0.5 > 0.0 or 0.5 < 0.0). However, the saturation (S) or the value (V) are appropriate projection functions for your purpose:
If you want to have colored pixels "larger" than monochrome pixels, you will prefer S.
If you want to have lighter pixels larger than darker pixels, you will probably prefer V.
Also any combination of S and V would be a valid projection function, e.g. S+V.
As far as I understand, you want a measure to calculate distance/similarity between two Vec3b pixels. This can be reflected to the general problem of finding distance between two vectors in an n-mathematical space.
One of the famous measures (and I think this is what you're asking for), is the Euclidean distance.
If you are using Opencv then you can simply use:
cv::Vec3b a(1, 1, 1);
cv::Vec3b b(5, 5, 5);
double dist = cv::norm(a, b, CV_L2);
You can refer to this for reading about cv::norm and its options.
Edit: If you are doing this to measure color similarity, it's recommended to use the LAB color space as it's proved that Euclidean distance in LAB space is a good approximation for human perception of colors.
Edit 2: I see what you mean, for this you can get the magnitude of each vector and then compare them, something like this:
double a_magnitude = cv::norm(a, CV_L2);
double b_magnitude = cv::norm(b, CV_L2);
if(a_magnitude > b_magnitude)
// do something
else
// do something else.

Generate Color between two specific values

I have a lowest speed Color and a highest speed Color
I have another variable called currentSpeed which gives me the current speed. I'd like to generate a Color between the two extremes using the current speed. Any hints?
The easiest solution is probably to linearly interpolate each of RGB (because that is probably the format your colours are in). However it can lead to some strange results. If lowest is bright blue (0x0000FF) and highest is bright yellow (0xFFFF00), then mid way will be dark grey (0x808080).
A better solution is probably:
Convert both colours to HSL (Hue, saturation, lightness)
Linearly interpolate those components
Convert the result back to RGB.
See this answer for how to do the conversion to and from HSL.
To do linear interpolation you will need something like:
double low_speed = 20.0, high_speed = 40.0; // The end points.
int low_sat = 50, high_sat = 200; // The value at the end points.
double current_speed = 35;
const auto scale_factor = (high_sat-low_sat)/(high_speed-low_speed);
int result_sat = low_sat + scale_factor * (current_speed - low_speed);
Two problems:
You will need to be careful about integer rounding if speeds are not actually double.
When you come to interpolate hue, you need to know that they are represented as angles on a circle - so you have a choice whether to interpolate clockwise or anti-clockwise (and one of them will go through 360 back to 0).

JPEG: YCrCb <-> RGB conversion precision

I've implemented rgb->ycrcb and ycrcb->rgb conversion using JPEG conversion formulae from
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/JPEG/jfif3.pdf
(the same at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YCbCr (JPEG conversion)).
When checking whether results are correct (original->YCrCb->RGB), some of pixels differ by one, e.g 201->200.
Average percent of precision errors is 0.1%, so it's not critical.
/// converts RGB pixel to YCrCb using { en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YCbCr: JPEG conversion }
ivect4 rgb2ycrcb(int r, int g, int b)
{
int y = round(0.299*r + 0.587*g + 0.114*b) ;
int cb = round(128.0 - (0.1687*r) - (0.3313*g) + (0.5*b));
int cr = round(128.0 + (0.5*r) - (0.4187*g) - (0.0813*b));
return ivect4(y, cr, cb, 255);
}
/// converts YCrCb pixel to RGB using { en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YCbCr: JPEG conversion }
ivect4 ycrcb2rgb(int y, int cr, int cb)
{
int r = round(1.402*(cr-128) + y);
int g = round(-0.34414*(cb-128)-0.71414*(cr-128) + y);
int b = round(1.772*(cb-128) + y);
return ivect4(r, g, b, 255);
}
I use round formula:
floor((x) + 0.5)
When using other types of rounding, e.g. float(int), or std::ceil(), results are even worse.
So, does there exist the way to do YCrCb <-> RGB conversion without loss in precision?
The problem isn't rounding modes.
Even if you converted your floating point constants to ratios and used only integer math, you'd still see different values after the inverse.
To see why, consider a function where I tell you I'm going to shift the numbers 0 through N to the range 0 through N-2. The fact is that this transform is just doesn't have an inverse. You can represent it more or less exactly with a floating point computation (f(x) = x*(N-2)/N), but some of the neighboring values will map to the same result in integer math (pigeonhole principle!). This is a simplification and "compresses" the range, but the same thing happens in arbitrary affine transforms like this one you are using.
If you had r, g, b in floating point, and kept it that way until you quantized to integer, that would be a different story - but in integers you will necessarily always see some difference between the original and the inverse.
Only about 60% of all RGB values can be represented in YCbCr space when using the same amount of bits for both triplets. This means the most damage happens in RGB->YCbCr when you take a 3*8 bit RGB triplet, convert and round it back to 3*8 bits of precision. The trick is to store the YCbCr triplet at a higher precision until it's time to do forward DCT. There, the data needs to be scaled up anyway, so you can do e.g. 16 bit * 16 bit -> MSB16 multiplies, which are well supported by various SIMD instruction sets.
At the decoder it's the reverse: The results of inverse DCT have to be stored at higher precision until it's time to do the YCbCr->RGB conversion.
This doesn't make the process lossless, but for JPEG, it may buy a few dB of PSNR at the extreme high end of the quality scale, i.e. where the difference can't be seen with a naked eye but can be measured.
Yes, supposedly JPEG XR defines a color conversion that is reversible. The code is open source if you want to investigate in depth how they're doing it. The method is loosely described on the Wiki-page I linked to.
Also this SO post might give you some insights.
Another problem is that there is not a 1 to 1 mapping between rgb and YCbCR. There are YCbCr values with no corresponding RGB value and RBG values with no corresponding YCbCR values.

Mapping colors to an interval

I'm porting a MATLAB piece of code in C/C++ and I need to map many RGB colors in a graph to an integer interval.
Let [-1;1] be the interval a function can have a value in, I need to map -1 and any number below it to a color, +1 and any number above it to another color, any number between -1 and +1 to another color intermediate between the boundaries. Obviously numbers are infinite so I'm not getting worried about how many colors I'm going to map, but it would be great if I could map at least 40-50 colors in it.
I thought of subdividing the [-1;1] interval into X sub-intervals and map every one of them to a RGB color, but this sounds like a terribly boring and long job.
Is there any other way to achieve this? And if there isn't, how should I do this in C/C++?
If performance isn't an issue, then I would do something similar to what High Performance Mark suggested, except maybe do it in HSV color space: Peg the S and V values at maximum and vary the H value linearly over a particular range:
s = 1.0; v = 1.0;
if(x <= -1){h = h_min;}
else if(x >= 1){h = h_max;}
else {h = h_min + (h_max - h_min)*0.5*(x + 1.0);}
// then convert h, s, v back to r, g, b - see the wikipedia link
If performance is an issue (e.g., you're trying to process video in real-time or something), then calculate the rgb values ahead of time and load them from a file as an array. Then simply map the value of x to an index:
int r, g, b;
int R[NUM_COLORS];
int G[NUM_COLORS];
int B[NUM_COLORS];
// load R, G, B from a file, or define them in a header file, etc
unsigned int i = 0.5*(x + 1.0);
i = MIN(NUM_COLORS-1, i);
r = R[i]; g = G[i]; b = B[i];
Here's a poor solution. Define a function which takes an input, x, which is a float (or double) and returns a triplet of integers each in the range 0-255. This triplet is, of course, a specification of an RGB color.
The function has 3 pieces;
if x<=-1 f[x] = {0,0,0}
if x>= 1 f[x] = {255,255,255}
if -1<x<1 f[x] = {floor(((x + 1)/2)*255),floor(((x + 1)/2)*255),floor(((x + 1)/2)*255)}
I'm not very good at writing C++ so I'll leave this as pseudocode, you shouldn't have too much problem turning it into valid code.
The reason it isn't a terribly good function is that there isn't a natural color gradient between the values that this plots through RGB color space. I mean, this is likely to produce a sequence of colors which is at odds to most people's expectations of how colors should change. If you are one of those people, I invite you to modify the function as you see fit.
For all of this I blame RGB color space, it is ill-suited to this sort of easy computation of 'neighbouring' colors.

Finding nearest RGB colour

I was told to use distance formula to find if the color matches the other one so I have,
struct RGB_SPACE
{
float R, G, B;
};
RGB_SPACE p = (255, 164, 32); //pre-defined
RGB_SPACE u = (192, 35, 111); //user defined
long distance = static_cast<long>(pow(u.R - p.R, 2) + pow(u.G - p.G, 2) + pow(u.B - p.B, 2));
this gives just a distance, but how would i know if the color matches the user-defined by at least 25%?
I'm not just sure but I have an idea to check each color value to see if the difference is 25%. for example.
float R = u.R/p.R * 100;
float G = u.G/p.G * 100;
float B = u.B/p.B * 100;
if (R <= 25 && G <= 25 && B <= 25)
{
//color matches with pre-defined color.
}
I would suggest not to check in RGB space. If you have (0,0,0) and (100,0,0) they are similar according to cababungas formula (as well as according to casablanca's which considers too many colors similar). However, they LOOK pretty different.
The HSL and HSV color models are based on human interpretation of colors and you can then easily specify a distance for hue, saturation and brightness independently of each other (depending on what "similar" means in your case).
"Matches by at least 25%" is not a well-defined problem. Matches by at least 25% of what, and according to what metric? There's tons of possible choices. If you compare RGB colors, the obvious ones are distance metrics derived from vector norms. The three most important ones are:
1-norm or "Manhattan distance": distance = abs(r1-r2) + abs(g1-g2) + abs(b1-b2)
2-norm or Euclidean distance: distance = sqrt(pow(r1-r2, 2) + pow(g1-g2, 2) + pow(b1-b2, 2)) (you compute the square of this, which is fine - you can avoid the sqrt if you're just checking against a threshold, by squaring the threshold too)
Infinity-norm: distance = max(abs(r1-r2), abs(g1-g2), abs(b1-b2))
There's lots of other possibilities, of course. You can check if they're within some distance of each other: If you want to allow up to 25% difference (over the range of possible RGB values) in one color channel, the thresholds to use for the 3 methods are 3/4*255, sqrt(3)/4*255 and 255/4, respectively. This is a very coarse metric though.
A better way to measure distances between colors is to convert your colors to a perceptually uniform color space like CIELAB and do the comparison there; there's a fairly good Wikipedia article on the subject, too. That might be overkill depending on your intended application, but those are the color spaces where measured distances have the best correlation with distances perceived by the human visual system.
Note that the maximum possible distance is between (255, 255, 255) and (0, 0, 0), which are at a distance of 3 * 255^2. Obviously these two colours match the least (0% match) and they are a distance 100% apart. Then at least a 25% match means a distance less than 75%, i.e. 3 / 4 * 3 * 255^2 = 9 / 4 * 255 * 255. So you could just check if:
distance <= 9 / 4 * 255 * 255