Line sequence approximation of closed curve from edge detector in Matlab - matlab

I have a large array of 2D points representing the outer edge of a shape delivered by an edge detector. I want to approximate this closed curve by a sequence of straight lines that is preserving the original edge according to some metric like least square and a chosen threshold (which is basically the task of "straight line drawing vectorization" but "vectorization" has a different meaning in Matlab so web search was misleading).
Could someone please propose free Matlab code for this task. Thank you!

Instead of an edge detector I am using now a boundary tracer to get an ordered coordinate set. Whats left is an adaptive sampling strategy for the coordinates but at the moment a simple strategy like "select every nth coordinate" works good enough.

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how to perform hough transformfor finding hand curve

hi i want to detect fingertips point and valleypoint of hand by using hough transform.Simply the Question is what is the [H,theta,rho]=hough(BW) is good for extract these point.
the image is here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/n1lz7b5eedzbui7/AADwy5O1l7sWf5aOx7KWAmhOa?dl=0
tnx
The standard hough transformation is just for detecting straight lines. Not more and not less. The Matlab function hough (please see here) returns the so-called hough space H, a parametric space which is used to find these lines and the parametric representation of each line: rho = x*cos(theta) + y*sin(theta).
You will have to do more than this to detect your desired points. Since your fingers usually won't consist of straight lines, I think you should think of something else anyway, e.g. if you can assume such a perfect curve as the one in your image maybe this is interesting for you.
Another simple technique you might consider is to compare the straight line distance between two points on your hand line to the distance between those two points along the perimeter (geodesic distance). For this you would need an ordered list of points along the perimeter.
Along regions of high curvature, the straight line distance between two points will be smaller than the number of pixels between those two points along the perimeter.
For example, you could check perimeter pixels separate by 10 pixels. That is, you would search through the list and compare the point at index N and the point index N+10. (You'll need to loop back around to the beginning of the list as you approach the end.) If the straight line distance between these two points is nearly 10 pixels as well, then you know those points lie on a straight section of the perimeter. If the straight line distance is much smaller than 10, then you know the perimeter curves in some fashion between those points. Whether you check pixels that are 5, 10, 20, or 30 items apart in the list will depend on the resolution of your image and the curves you're looking for.
This technique is useful because it's simple and quick to implement. Maybe it would work well enough for your needs.
Yet another way: simplify the outline to small line segments, and then you can calculate the line-line angle between adjacent segments. To simplify the curves, implement the Ramer-Douglas-Puecker algorithm. A little experimentation will reveal what parameter settings will work for your application.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramer%E2%80%93Douglas%E2%80%93Peucker_algorithm
Finally, you could look into piecewise curve fitting: a curve would be fitted to small segments of the outline. This can get very complicated, and researchers continue to find ways to decompose complex figures into a limited number of more basic shapes or curves. I recommend trying the simplest technique and then only adding complexity if you need it.

Detecting overlapped elliptical regions in image (MATLAB)

I have a multiple plants in a single binary image. How would I identify each leaf in the image assuming that each leaf is approximately elliptical?
example input: http://i.imgur.com/BwhLVmd.png
I was thinking a good place to start would be finding the tip of each leaf and then getting the center of each plant. Then I could fit the curves starting from the tip and then going to the center. I've been looking online and saw something involving a watershed method, but I do not know where to begin with that idea.
You should be aware that these things are tricky to get working robustly - there will always be a failure case.
This said, I think your idea is not bad.
You could start as follows:
Identify the boundary curve of each plant (i.e. pixels with both foreground and background in their neighbourhood).
Compute the centroid of each plant.
Convert each plant boundary to a polar coordinate system, with the centroid as the origin. This amounts to setting up a coordinate system with the distance of each boundary curve point on the Y axis and the angle on the X axis.
In this representation of the boundary curve, try to identify maxima; these are the tips of the leaves. You will probably need to do some smoothing. Use the parts of the curve before and after the maxima the start fitting your ellipses or some other shape.
Generally, a polar coordinate system is always useful for analysing stuff thats roughly circular.
To fit you ellipses, once you have a rough initial position, I would probably try an EM-style approach.
I would do something like this (I is your binary image)
I=bwmorph(bwmorph(I, 'bridge'), 'clean');
SK=bwmorph(I, 'skel', Inf);
endpts = bwmorph(SK,'endpoints');
props=regionprops(I, 'All');
And then connect every segment from the centroids listed in props.centroid to the elements of endpts that should give you your leaves (petals?).
A bit of filtering is probably necessary, bwmorph is your friend. Have fun!

Corner Detection in 2D Vector Data

I am trying to detect corners (x/y coordinates) in 2D scatter vectors of data.
The data is from a laser rangefinder and our current platform uses Matlab (though standalone programs/libs are an option, but the Nav/Control code is on Matlab so it must have an interface).
Corner detection is part of a SLAM algorithm and the corners will serve as the landmarks.
I am also looking to achieve something close to 100Hz in terms of speed if possible (I know its Matlab, but my data set is pretty small.)
Sample Data:
[Blue is the raw data, red is what I need to detect. (This view is effectively top down.)]
[Actual vector data from above shots]
Thus far I've tried many different approaches, some more successful than others.
I've never formally studied machine vision of any kind.
My first approach was a homebrew least squares line fitter, that would split lines in half resurivly until they met some r^2 value and then try to merge ones with similar slope/intercepts. It would then calculate the intersections of these lines. It wasn't very good, but did work around 70% of the time with decent accuracy, though it had some bad issues with missing certain features completely.
My current approach uses the clusterdata function to segment my data based on mahalanobis distance, and then does basically the same thing (least squares line fitting / merging). It works ok, but I'm assuming there are better methods.
[Source Code to Current Method] [cnrs, dat, ~, ~] = CornerDetect(data, 4, 1) using the above data will produce the locations I am getting.
I do not need to write this from scratch, it just seemed like most of the higher-class methods are meant for 2D images or 3D point clouds, not 2D scatter data. I've read a lot about Hough transforms and all sorts of data clustering methods (k-Means etc). I also tried a few canned line detectors without much success. I tried to play around with Line Segment Detector but it needs a greyscale image as an input and I figured it would be prohibitivly slow to convert my vector into a full 2D image to feed it into something like LSD.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
I'd approach it as a problem of finding extrema of curvature that are stable at multiple scales - and the split-and-merge method you have tried with lines hints at that.
You could use harris corner detector for detecting corners.

How to detect curves in a binary image?

I have a binary image, i want to detect/trace curves in that image. I don't know any thing (coordinates, angle etc). Can any one guide me how should i start? suppose i have this image
I want to separate out curves and other lines. I am only interested in curved lines and their parameters. I want to store information of curves (in array) to use afterward.
It really depends on what you mean by "curve".
If you want to simply identify each discrete collection of pixels as a "curve", you could use a connected-components algorithm. Each component would correspond to a collection of pixels. You could then apply some test to determine linearity or some other feature of the component.
If you're looking for straight lines, circular curves, or any other parametric curve you could use the Hough transform to detect the elements from the image.
The best approach is really going to depend on which curves you're looking for, and what information you need about the curves.
reference links:
Circular Hough Transform Demo
A Brief Description of the Application of the Hough
Transform for Detecting Circles in Computer Images
A method for detection of circular arcs based on the Hough transform
Google goodness
Since you already seem to have a good binary image, it might be easiest to just separate the different connected components of the image and then calculate their parameters.
First, you can do the separation by scanning through the image, and when you encounter a black pixel you can apply a standard flood-fill algorithm to find out all the pixels in your shape. If you have matlab image toolbox, you can find use bwconncomp and bwselect procedures for this. If your shapes are not fully connected, you might apply a morphological closing operation to your image to connect the shapes.
After you have segmented out the different shapes, you can filter out the curves by testing how much they deviate from a line. You can do this simply by picking up the endpoints of the curve, and calculating how far the other points are from the line defined by the endpoints. If this value exceeds some maximum, you have a curve instead of a line.
Another approach would be to measure the ratio of the distance of the endpoints and length of the object. This ratio would be near 1 for lines and larger for curves and wiggly shapes.
If your images have angles, which you wish to separate from curves, you might inspect the directional gradient of your curves. Segment the shape, pick set of equidistant points from it and for each point, calculate the angle to the previous point and to the next point. If the difference of the angle is too high, you do not have a smooth curve, but some angled shape.
Possible difficulties in implementation include thick lines, which you can solve by skeleton transformation. For matlab implementation of skeleton and finding curve endpoints, see matlab image processing toolkit documentation
1) Read a book on Image Analysis
2) Scan for a black pixel, when found look for neighbouring pixels that are also black, store their location then make them white. This gets the points in one object and removes it from the image. Just keep repeating this till there are no remaining black pixels.
If you want to separate the curves from the straight lines try line fitting and then getting the coefficient of correlation. Similar algorithms are available for curves and the correlation tells you the closeness of the point to the idealised shape.
There is also another solution possible with the use of chain codes.
Understanding Freeman chain codes for OCR
The chain code basically assigns a value between 1-8(or 0 to 7) for each pixel saying at which pixel location in a 8-connected neighbourhood does your connected predecessor lie. Thus like mention in Hackworths suggestions one performs connected component labeling and then calculates the chain codes for each component curve. Look at the distribution and the gradient of the chain codes, one can distinguish easily between lines and curves. The problem with the method though is when we have osciallating curves, in which case the gradient is less useful and one depends on the clustering of the chain codes!
Im no computer vision expert, but i think that you could detect lines/curves in binary images relatively easy using some basic edge-detection algorithms (e.g. sobel filter).

MATLAB: How to find the image of the line at infinity corresponding to a plane?

There is an image of two separated papers on the floor.
How to find the image of the line at infinity corresponding to the plane of the floor?
See the image at: (larger)
Anyone has some idea on how to start with MATLAB?
Thank you,
I'm not going to go into matlab specific bits but wil talk about the algorithm I'd use.
Considering only one piece of paper the algorithm goes something like this.
Find the corners of the paper
Choose one set of parallel edges and find their intersection in the image call this point P1
Find the intersection point of the other pair of parallel edges. Call this P2.
Your horizon line (or line at infinity) is the line joining P1 and P2 (extending beyond them)
However I'm not sure how robust this will be to
Image processing artifacts
Not perfectly rectangular paper.
Numerical issues.
You should be able to use both pieces to get an improved approximation to the solution. For example you could calculate P1 and P2 for both pieces and finding the line of best fit through the 4 points.
Hope this gives you some ideas.