I am trying to erode objects in a binary image such that they do not become smaller than some fixed size. Consider, for instance, a binary map composed of connected components (blobs), wherein one defines blob size by either the minimal or maximal antipolar (anti-perimetric) distance (i.e., the distance between two points that are as far from one another as they can be on the perimeter or contour of the blob; if the contour consists of N consecutively numbered points, then the distances evaluated would be those between points 1 and N/2+1, points 2 and N/2+2, etc.). Given such an arrangement, I seek to erode these blobs until the distance metric reaches a specified limit. If the blobs were simple circles, then the effect could be realized by ultimate erosion followed by dilation to a fixed size; however, the contour of an irregular object would be lost by such a procedure. Is there a way to achieve such an effect for connected, irregular components using built-in functions in MATLAB?
With no image and already tried code presented I can understand you wrong, but may be iterative using bwmorph with 'thin','skel' or 'shrink' will help you.
while(cond < cond_threshold)
bw=bwmorph(bw,...,1); %one of the options above
cond = calc_cond(bw);
end
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I have two binary images, each of which have a single white filled parallelogram and a black background. The only difference between the two images is that the parallelograms are in different locations and are slightly different from one another in shape. All the parameters between the two images are the same except for that one change.
I want to check how similar the shape of the two parallelograms are, by using some sort of comparing measure.
I looked into ssimval function in MATLAB but it seems to be taking the whole image into consideration rather than just the white blobs. Is there any other function I can use for this purpose?
For visually checking similarity, you can plot their probability density function and for numeric similarity, compute some similarity measure, such as, KL Divergence, etc.
In a simple way, you can segment your binary image with simple bwlabel function. Then use regionprops function to find perimeter and area of your desire segment. Moreover, center of region is also another comparison point.
You could do it with polygons, by using the polyshape class.
First convert the binary mask to a set of corner points. You can do it with a convex hull, by calling regionprops(bwI, 'ConvexHull').
Then convert the corner points into polygons, by calling polyshape.
Finally measure the dissimiliarities of the polygons by measuring their turning distance. Turning distance is rotation- and scaling invariant, so you might want to add additive terms to your distance metric for those if your problem demands it.
A very simple solution for comparing two binary image is using boolean operations.
Your images contains zero and one values. so If you use boolean operation.
suppose your two images are : B1 , B2
C = B1 & (~B2)
if sum(C(:))==0
% two image are same
else
% two image are different
end
I am currently doing some image segmentation on a bone qCT picture, see for instance images below.
I am trying to find the different borders in the picture for instance the outer border separating the bone to the noisy background. In this analysis I am getting a list of points (vec(1,:) containing x values and vex(2,:) containing the y values) in random order.
To get them into order I am using using a block of code which effectively takes the first point vec(1,1),vec(1,2) and then finds the closest point among the rest of the points in the vector. And then repeats.
Now my problem is that I want to smooth the data but how do I do that as the points lie in a circular formation? (I do have the Curve Fitting Toolbox)
Not exactly a smoothing procedure, but a way to simplify your data would be to compute the boundary of the convex hull of the data.
K = convhull(O(1,:), O(2,:));
plot(O(1,K), O(2,K));
You could also consider using alpha shapes if you want more control.
I'm looking for a quick way to combine overlapping blocks into one image. Assume the size of the full image and the coordinates of each block within the full image are known. Also assume the blocks are regularly spaced both horizontally and vertically.
The catch - in the overlapping region, a pixel in the output image should get a value according to a weighted average of the corresponding pixels in the overlapping blocks. The weights should be proportional to the distance from the block center.
So, for example, take a pixel location p (relative to the full image coordinates) in the overlapping region between block B1 and B2. Assume the overlap region is due to a horizontal shift only of size h. If B1(p) and B2(p) are the values at that location as they appear in blocks B1,B2, and d1,d2 are the respective distances of p from the center of blocks B1 and B2 then in the output image O the location p will get O(p) = (h-d1)/h*B1(p) + (h-d2)/h*B2(p).
Note that generally, there can be up to 4 overlapping blocks in any region.
I'm looking for the best way to do this in Matlab. Hopefully, for any choice of distance function.
blockproc and alike can help splitting an image into blocks but allow for very basic combination of results. imfuse comes close to what I need, but offers simple non-weighted alpha blending only. bwdist seems to be useful, but I haven't figured what the most efficient method to put it to use is.
You should use the command im2col.
Once you have all your patches in vectors aligned in one matrix you'll be able to work on the columns (Filtering per patch) and rows (Filtering between patches).
It will be trickier than the classic usage of im2col but it should work.
I am looking for a method that looks for shapes in 3D image in matlab. I don't have a real 3D sample image right now; in fact, my 3D image is actually a set of quantized 2D images.
The figure below is what I am trying to accomplish:
Although the example figure above is a 2D image, please understand that I am trying to do this in 3D. The input shape has these "tentacles", and I have to look for irregular shapes among them. The size of the tentacle from one point to another can change around but at "consistent and smooth" pace - that is it can be big at first, then gradually smaller later. But if suddenly, the shape just gets bigger not so gradually, like the red bottom right area in the figure above, then this is one of the volume of interests. Note that these shapes have more tendency to be rounded and spherical, but some of them are completely arbitrary and random.
I've tried the following methods so far:
Erode n times and dilate n times: given that the "tentacles" are always smaller than the volume of interest, this method will work as long as the volume is not too small. And, we need to have a mechanism to deal with thicker portion of the tentacle that becomes false positive somehow.
Hough Transform: although I have been suggested this method earlier (from Segmenting circle-like shapes out of Binary Image), I see that it works for some of the more rounded shape cases, but at the same time, more difficult cases such that of less-rounded, distorted, and/or arbitrary shapes can slip through this method.
Isosurface: because of my input is a set of 2D quantized images, using an isosurface allow me to reconstruct image in 3D and see things clearer. However, I'm not sure what could be done further in this case.
So can anyone suggests some other techniques for segmenting such shape out of these "tentacles"?
Every point on your image has the property that it is either part of the tentacle, or part of the volume of interest. If it is unknown apriori what the expected girth of the tentacle is, then 1 wont work because we won't be able to set n. However, we know that the n that erases the tentacle is smaller than the n that erases the node. You can for each point replace it with an integer representing the distance to the edge. Effectively, this can be done via successive single pixel erosion, and replacing each pixel with the count of the iteration at which it was erased. Lets call this the thickness at the pixel, but my rusty old mind tells me that there was a term of art for this.
Now we want to search for regions that have a higher-than-typical morphological distance from the boundary. I would do this by first skeletonizing the image (http://www.mathworks.com/help/toolbox/images/ref/bwmorph.html) and then searching for local maxima of the thickness along the skeleton. These are points on the skeleton where the thickness is larger than the neighbor points.
Finally I would sort the local maxima by the thickness, a threshold on which should help to separate the volumes of interest from the false positives.
the output of some processing consists of a binary map with several connected areas.
The objective is, for each area, to compute and draw on the image a line crossing the area on its longest axis, but not extending further. It is very important that the line lies just inside the area, therefore ellipse fitting is not very good.
Any hint on how to do achieve this result in an efficient way?
If you have the image processing toolbox you can use regionprops which will give you several standard measures of any binary connected region. This includes
You can also get the tightest rectangular bounding box, centroid, perimeter, orientation. These will all help you in ellipse fitting.
Depending on how you would like to draw your lines, the regionprops function also returns the length for major and minor axes in 2-D connected regions and does it on a per-connected-region basis, giving you a vector of axis lengths. If you specify 4 neighbor connected you are fairly sure that the length will be exclusively within the connected region. But this is not guaranteed since `regionprops' calculates major axis length of an ellipse that has the same normalized second central moment as the connected region.
My first inclination would be to treat the pixels as 2D points and use principal components analysis. PCA will give you the major axis of each region (princomp if you have the stat toolbox).
Regarding making line segments and not lines, not knowing anything about the shape of these regions, an efficient method doesn't occur to me. Assuming the region could have any arbitrary shape, you could just trace along each line until you reach the edge of the region. Then repeat in the other direction.
I assumed you already have the binary image divided into regions. If this isn't true you could use bwlabel (if the regions aren't touching) or k-means (if they are) first.