I'm relatively new to OpenCV, and I'm working on a project where I need to count the number of objects on a grid. the grid is the background of the image, and there's either an object in each space or there isn't; I need to count the number present, and I don't really know where to start. I've searched here and other places, but can't seem to find what I'm looking for. I will need to be tracking the space numbers of the grid in the future, so I will also eventually need to know whether each grid space is occupied or empty. I'm not going so far as to ask for a coded example, but does anybody know of any source or tutorials to accomplish this task or one similar to it? Thanks for your help!
Further Details: images will come from a stable-mounted camera, objects are of relatively uniform shape, but varying size and color.
I would first answer a few questions:
Will an object be completely enclosed in a grid cell? Or can it be placed on top of a grid line? (In other words, will the object hide a line from the camera?)
Will more than one object be in one cell?
Can an object occupy more than one cell? (closely related to question 1)
Given reasonable answers to those questions, I believe the problem can be broken into two parts: first, identify the centers of each grid space. To count objects, you can then sample that region to see if anything "not background" is there.
You can then assume that a grid space is defined by four strong, regularly-placed, corner features. (For the sake of discussion, I'll assume you've performed the initial image preparation as needed: histogram equalization, gaussian blur for noise reduction, etc.) From there, you might try some of OpenCV's methods for finding corners (Harris corner detector, cvGoodFeaturesToTrack, etc). It's likely that you can borrow some of the techniques found in OpenCV's square finding example (samples/c/square.c). For this task, it's probably sufficient to assume that the grid center is just the centroid of each set of "adjacent" (or sufficiently near) corners.
Alternatively, you might use the Hough transform to identify the principal horizontal and vertical lines in the image. You can then determine the intersection points to identify the extents of each grid cell. This implementation might be more challenging since inferring structure (or adjacency) from "nearby" vertices in order to find a grid center seems more difficult.
Related
I hope you are doing well. I am stuck at one part of a visual effect program in C++, and wanted to ask for help.
I have an array of colors at random positions on an image. There can be any number of these "subpixels" that fall over top of any given pixel. The subpixels that overlap a pixel can be at any position within the pixel, since they're distributed randomly throughout the image. All I have access to is their position on the image and their color, which represents what the color should be at that precise subpixel point on the image.
I need to determine what color to make each pixel of the image. In other words, I need to interpolate what the color should be at the centre of each pixel.
Here is a diagram with an example of this on a 5x5 image:
I need to go from this:
To this:
If it aids your understanding, you can think of the first image as a series of random points whose color values were calculated using bilinear interpolation on the second image.
I am writing this in C++, and ideally it will be as fast as possible, but I welcome contributions in any language or just explained with symbols or words. It should be as accurate as possible, but I also welcome solutions that are slightly inaccurate in favour of performance or simplicity.
Please let me know if you need clarification on the problem.
Thank you.
I ended up finding quite a decent solution which, while it doesn't find the absolutely 100% technically correct color for each pixel, was more than good enough and acceptably fast, especially when I added multithreading.
I first create a vector for each pixel/cell that contains pointers to subpixels (points with known colors). When I create a subpixel, I add a pointer to it to the vector representing the pixel/cell that it overlaps and to each of the vectors representing pixels/cells directly adjacent to the pixel/cell that that it overlaps.
Then, I split each pixel/cell into n sub-cells (I found 8 works well). This is not as expensive as you might imagine, because I only have to calculate & compare the distance for those subpixels that are in that pixel/cell's subpixel pointer vector. For each sub-cell, I calculate which subpixel is the closest to its centre. That subpixel's color then contributes 1/nth of the color for that pixel/cell.
I found it was important to add the subpixel pointers to adjacent cell/pixel vectors, so that each sub-cell can take into account subpixels from adjacent pixels/cells. This even makes it produce a reasonable color when there are pixels/cells that have no subpixels overlapping them (as long as the neighboring pixels/cells do).
Thanks for all the comments so far; any ideas about how to speed this up would be appreciated as well.
I want to locate a service robot via infrared landmarks. The idea is to detect two landmarks, get the distance to the landmarks and calculate the robots position from these informations (the position of the landmarks are known).
For this I have built an artificial 2x3 matrix of IR LEDs, which are visible in the robots infrared camera image (shown in the image below).
As the first step, I want to detect a single landmark in a picture and get it's x-y coordinates. I can use these coordinates in the future to get the distance from the depth-image provided.
My first approach was to convert the image to a black and white image. Then I tried to filter out different cluster of points (which i dilated and contoured in the first place). I couldn't succeed with this method.
Now I wonder if there are any pattern recognition/computer vision methods which can help me to quite "easily" detect the pattern.
I've added a picture of the infrared image with the landmark in it and a converted black/white image.
a) Which method can help me to solve this problem?
b) Should I use a 3x3 Matrix or any other geometric form instead of the 2x3 Matrix ?
IR-Image
Black-White Image
A direct answer:
1) find all small circles in the image; 2) look among these small circles for ones that are the same size and close together, and, say, form parallel lines.
The reason for this approach is that you have coded the robot with a specific pattern of small objects. Therefore, look for the objects and then look for the pattern. (If the orientation and size wouldn't change, then you could just look for a sub-image within the larger image, but because it can, you need to look for elements of the pattern that remain consistent with motion in the 3D space, that is, the parallel lines.)
This will work in the example images, but to know whether this will work more generally, we need to know more than you told us: It depends on whether the variation in the images of the matrix and the variations in the background will let this be enough to distinguish between them. If not, maybe you need a more clever algorithm or maybe a different pattern of lights. In the extreme case, it's obvious that if you had another 2x3 matric around, it's not enough. It all depends on the variation of the object to be identified and the variations within the background scene, and because you don't tell us either of these things, it's hard to say the best way, what's good enough, what's a better way, etc.
If you have the choice, and here it sound like you do, good data is better than clever analysis. For this problem, I'd call good data to be anything that clearly distinguishes the object from the background. You need to think of it this way, and look at what the background is, and all the different perspectives on the lights that are possible, and make sure these can never be confused.
For example, if you have a lot of control over this, and enough time, temporal variations are often the easiest. Turning the lights (or a subset of the lights) on and off, etc, and then looking for the expected temporal variation is often the surest way to distinguish signal from noise — but really, this again is just making an assumption about the background and foreground (ie, that the background won't vary with some particular time pattern).
I'm using the ORB algorithm to detect and get the coordinates of the crossings of rope shown in the image, which is represented by the red dot. I want to detect the coordinates of the four points surrounding the crossing represented by the blue dots. All the four points have the same distance from the red spot.
Any idea how to get their coordinates by getting use of the red spot coordinate.
Thank you in Advance
Although you're using ORB, you're still going to need an algorithm to segment the rope from the background, or at least some technique to identify image chunks that belong to the rope and that are equidistant from the red dot. There are a number of options to explore.
It's important to consider your lighting & imaging as separate problems to be solved if this is meant to be a real-world application. This looks a bit like a problem for a class rather than for a application you'll sell and support, but you should still consider lighting:
Will your algorithm(s) still work when light level is reduced?
How will detection be affected by changes in camera pose relative to the surface where the rope will be located?
If you'll be detecting "black" rope, will the algorithm also be required to detect rope of different colors? dirty rope? rope on different backgrounds?
Since you're object of interest is rope, you have to consider a class of algorithms suitable for detection of non-rigid objects. Always consider the simplest solution first!
Connected Components
Connected components labeling is a traditional image processing algorithm and still suitable as the starting point for many applications. The last I knew, this was implemented in OpenCV as findContours(). This can also be called "blob finding" or some variant thereof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connected-component_labeling
https://docs.opencv.org/2.4/modules/imgproc/doc/structural_analysis_and_shape_descriptors.html?highlight=findcontours
Depending on lighting, you may have to take different steps to binarize the image before running connected components. As a start, convert the color image to grayscale, which will simplify the task significantly.
Try a manual threshold since you can quickly test a number of values to see the effect. Don't be too discouraged if the binarization isn't quite right--this can often be fixed with preprocessing.
If a range of manual thresholds works (e.g. 52 - 76 in an 8-bit grayscale range), then use an algorithm that will automatically calculate the threshold for you: Otsu, entropy-based methods, etc., will all offer comparable performance. Whichever technique works best, the code/algorithm can be tweaked further to optimize for your rope application.
If thresholding and binarization don't work--which for your rope application seems unlikely, at least how you've presented it--then switch to thinking in terms of gradient-based (edge-based, energy-based) techniques.
But assuming you can separate the rope from the background, you're still going to need a method to start at the red dot [within the rope] and move equal distances out to the blue points. More about that later after a discussion of other rope segmentation methods.
Note: connected components labeling can work in scenarios beyond just binarizing black & white images. If you can create a texture field or some other 2D representation of the image that makes it possible to distinguish the black rope from the relatively light background, you may be able to use a connected components algorithm. (Finding a "more complicated" or "more modern" algorithm isn't necessarily going to be the right approach.)
In a binarized image, blobs can be nested: on a white background you can have several black blobs, inside of one or more of which are white blobs, inside of which are black blobs, etc. An earlier version of OpenCV handled this reasonably well. (OpenCV is a nice starting point, and a touchpoint for many, but for a number of reasons it doesn't always compare favorably to other open source and commercial packages; popularity notwithstanding, OpenCV has some issues.)
Once you have a "blob" (a 4-connected region of pixels) in a 2D digital image, you can treat the blob as an object, at which point you have a number of options:
Edge tracing: trace around the inside and outside edges of the blob. From what I recall, OpenCV does (or at least should) have some relatively straightforward method to get the edges.
Split the blob into component blobs, each of which can be treated separately
Convert the blob to a polygon
...
A connected components algorithm should be high on the list of techniques to try if you have a non-rigid object.
Boolean Operations
Once you have the rope as a connected component (and possibly even without this), you can use boolean image operations to find the spots at the blue dots in your image:
Create a circular region in data, or even in the image
Find the intersection of the circle (an annulus) and the black region representing the rope. Using your original image, you should have four regions.
Find the center point of the intersection regions.
You could even try this without using connected components at all, but using connected components as part of the solution could make it more robust.
Polygon Simplification
If you have a blob, which in your application would be a connected set of black pixels representing the rope on the floor, then you can consider converting this blob to one or more polygons for further processing. There are advantages to working with polygons.
If you consider only the outside boundary of the rope, then you can see that the set of pixels defining the boundary represents a polygon. It's a polygon with a lot of points, and not a convex polygon, but a polygon nonetheless.
To simplify the polygon, you can use an algorithm such as Ramer-Douglas-Puecker:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramer%E2%80%93Douglas%E2%80%93Peucker_algorithm
Once you have a simplified polygon, you can try a few techniques to render useful data from the polygon
Angle Bisector Network
Triangulation (e.g. using ear clipping)
Triangulation is typically dependent on initial conditions, so the resulting triangulation for slighting different polygons (that is, rope -> blob -> polygon -> simplified polygon). So in your application it might be useful to triangulate the dark rope region, and then to connect the center of one triangle to the center of the next nearest triangle. You'll also have to deal with crossings, such as the rope overlap. Ultimately this can yield a "skeletonization" of the rope. Speaking of which...
Skeletonization
If the rope problem was posed to you as a class exercise, then it may have been a prompt to try skeletonization. You can read about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_skeleton
Skeletonization and thinning have their own problems to solve, but you should dig into them a bit and see those problems themselves.
The Medial Axis Transform (MAT) is a related concept. Long story there.
Edge-based techniques
There are a number of techniques to generate "edge images" based on edge strength, energy, entropy, etc. Making them robust takes a little effort. If you've had academic training in image processing you've likely heard of Harris, Sobel, Canny, and similar processing methods--none are magic bullets, but they're simple and dependable and will yield data you need.
An "edge image" consists of pixels representing the image gradient strength [and sometimes the gradient direction]. People may call this edge image something else, but it's the concept that matters.
What you then do with the edge data is another subject altogether. But one reason to think of edge images (or at least object borders) is that it reduces the amount of information your algorithm(s) will need to process.
Mean Shift (and related)
To get back to segmentation mentioned in the section on connected components, there are other methods for segmenting figures from a background: K-means, mean shift, and so on. You probably won't need any of those, but they're neat and worth studying.
Stroke Width Transform
This is an intriguing technique used to extract text from noisy backgrounds. Although it's intended for OCR, it could work for rope since the rope width is relatively constant, the rope shape varies, there are crossings, etc.
In short, and simplifying quite a bit, you can think of SWT as a means to find "strokes" (thick lines) by finding gradients antiparallel to each other. On either side of a stroke (or line), the edge gradient points normal to the object edge. The normal on one side of the stroke points opposite the direction of the normal on the other side of the stroke. By filtering for pixel-gradient pairs within a certain distance of each other, you can isolate certain strokes--even automatically. For your example the collection of points representing edge pairs for the rope would be much more common than other point pairs.
Non-Rigid Matching
There are techniques for matching non-rigid shapes, but they would not be worth exploring. If any of the techniques I mentioned above is unfamiliar to you, explore some of those first before you try any fancier algorithms.
CNNs, machine learning, etc.
Just don't even think of these methods as a starting point.
Other Considerations
If this were an application for industry, security, or whatnot, you'd have to determine how well your image processing worked under all environmental considerations. That's not an easy task, and can make all the difference between a setup that "works" in the lab and a setup that actually works in practice.
I hope that's of some help. Feel free to post a reply if I've confused more than helped, or if you want to explore some idea in more detail. Though I tried to touch on some common(ish) techniques, I didn't mention all the different ways of addressing this problem.
And briefly: once you have a skeleton, point network, or whatever representing a reduced data set for the rope and the red dot (the identified feature), a few techniques to find the items at the blue dots:
For a skeleton, trace along each "branch" of the rope outward from the know until the geodesic distance or straight-line 2D distance is the distance D that you want.
To use geometry, create a circle of width 1 - 2 pixels. Find the intersection of that circle and the rope. Find the center point of the intersections of circle and rope. (Also described above.)
Good luck!
I have written an algorithm to process a camera capture and extract a binary image of two features I'm interested in. I'm trying to find the best (fastest) way of detecting when the two features intersect and where the lowest (y coordinate is greatest) point is (this will be the intersection).
I do not want to use a findContours() based method as this is too slow and, in my opinion, unnecessary. I also think blob detection libraries are too bloated for this.
I have two sample images (sorry for low quality):
(not touching: http://i.imgur.com/7bQ9qMo.jpg)
(touching: http://i.imgur.com/tuSmKw7.jpg)
Due to the way these images are created, there is often noise in the top right corner which looks like pixelated lines but methods such as dilation and erosion lose resolution around the features I'm trying to find.
My initial thought would be to use direct pixel access to form a width filter and a height filter. The lowest point in the image is therefore the intersection.
I have no idea how to detect when they touch... logically I can see that a triangle is formed when they intersect and otherwise there is no enclosed black area. Can I fill the image starting from the corner with say, red, and then calculate how much of the image is still black?
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks
Your suggestion is a way more slow than finding contours. For binary images, finding contour is very easy and quick because you just need to find a black pixel followed by a white pixel or vice versa.
Anyway, if you don't want to use it, you can use the vertical projection or vertical profile you will see it the objects intersect or not.
For example, in the following image check the the letter "n" which is little similar to non-intersecting object, and the letter "o" which is similar to intersecting objects :
By analyzing the histograms you can recognize which one is intersecting or not.
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.