I am struggling to find a good contour detection function that would count the number of contour in bw images that I have processed using some previous tools. As you can see, my profile picture is an example of such images,
,
In this image, ideally, I wish to have a function which counts four closed contour.
I don't mind if it also detects the really tiny contours in between, or the entire shape itself as extra contours. As long as it counts the medium sized ones, I can fix the rest by applying area threshold. My problem is that any function I have tried detects only one contour - the entire shape, as it cannot separate it to the su-conours which are connected to one another.
Any suggestions?
Here is my shot at this, although your question might get closed because it's off-topic, too broad or a possible duplicate. Anyhow I propose another way to count the number of contours. You could also do it using bwboundaries as was demonstrated in the link provided by #knedlsepp in the possible duplicate. Just for the sake of it here is another way.
The idea is to apply a morphological closure of your image and actually count the number of enclosed surfaces instead instead of contours. That might end up being the same thing but I think it's easier to visualize surfaces.
Since the shapes in your image look like circle (kind of...) the structuring element used to close the image is a disk. The size (here 5) is up to you but for the image you provided its fine. After that, use regionprops to locate image regions (here the blobs) and count them, which comes back to counting contours I guess. You can provide the Area parameter to filter out shapes based on their area. Here I ask the function to provide centroids to plot them.
Whole code:
clear
clc
close all
%// Read, threshold and clean up the image
Im = im2bw(imread('ImContour.png'));
Im = imclearborder(Im);
%// Apply disk structuring element to morphologically close the image.
%// Play around with the size to alter the output.
se = strel('disk',5);
Im_closed = imclose(Im,se);
%// Find centroids of circle-ish shapes. Youcan also get the area to filter
%// out those you don't want.
S = regionprops(~Im_closed,'Centroid','Area');
%// remove the outer border of the image (1st output of regioprops).
S(1) = [];
%// Make array with centroids and show them.
Centro = vertcat(S.Centroid);
imshow(Im)
hold on
scatter(Centro(:,1),Centro(:,2),40,'filled')
And the output:
So as you see the algorithm detected 5 regions, but try playing a bit with the parameters and you will see which ones to change to get the desired output of 4.
Have fun!
Related
I am trying to detect the edge from black horizontal line to the gray-smeared foreground.
The desired edge/result is slightly marked red.
What have I tried so far :
My approach was to use the standard Chan-Vese Segmentation combined with several preprocseeing methods like gaussian blurring, maximum filter or morpholigocal operator like erosion. However, when I am initializing the level set function at the lower part of the image, the contour gets stuck right before the dersired edge.
Due to the noise I can't get rid off without destroying important information of the image, simple methods like the sobel or prewitt filtering might fail.
Another apporoach of me was to search for the maximum/minimum intensity columnwise of the image and mark the darkest pixel per column.
As you can assume, this will fail too because the edge I am looking for is not the only part that has dark pixels, that's why this method is very error-prone.
Edit
Snakes does not help either.
The active contour, marked as blue, simply goes over the edge and at the left and right the contour gets stuck. The Code I tried wasthe function Snake2D(I,P,Options) taken from here.
Here is the original image if you would like to help me.
I think your approach using the rows and finding the maximum is probably easiest.
The one problem you have is distinguishing the two main maxima. For this, you can apply a rough smoothing, to find the middle between the two maxima (blue line in image below). You can then only take the lower bit, which is the one you are interested in and find the maximum of this bit.
In a final step, just add up the two indices.
Result:
Could go like this:
ib = imread('LHkm2.png'); %Read image
sz = size(ib); %get dimensions
for i = 1:sz(2)
[~, ind_mid(i)] = max(smooth(-double(ib(:, i)), 130));%First round
line_to_smooth = ib(ind_mid(i):end, i);%Get line with one maximum
[~, ind(i)] = min(smooth(double(line_to_smooth), 10));%Second round
ind(i) = ind(i) + ind_mid(i);%Add indices to get final position
end
imshow(ib,[]);
hold on;
plot(ind_mid, 'LineWidth', 3);
plot(ind, 'LineWidth', 3);
Note: You can of course smooth the final line just like any other graphs to get rid of bumps like this:
ind = smooth(ind, 10)
where 10 is your smoothing window (the higher the broader, see here.
I'm trying to make an object recognition program using a k-NN classifier. I've got a bunch of images for the training part of the classifier and a bunch of images to recognize. Those images are in grayscale and there's an object (only its edge) per image. I need to calculate their center of mass so I use
img=im2bw(img)
and then regionprops(img,'centroid').
The problem is that some of those edges aren't closed so regionprops doesn't work then. I tried eroding the image (the edge is black, white background) but the endlines of those edges are too apart from eachother. I tried using bwmorph function to do so but still can't make it work.
Any ideas?
EDIT
I'm adding some images in case anyone wants to try:
Use morphological operation
Use a closing operation to make your structures filled.
1. As first step prepare your image data
im = imread('your image.jpg');
% Get first channel as gray scale information
im = im(:,:,1);
% Threshold it for simplicyty, you may work on grayscale too.
im1 = logical(im > 128);
2. Use a simple block shaped structuring element
The structuring element is defined by:
strel=ones(3,3);
You may use disk shaped elements or whatever gives the best result to you.
3. Apply structuring element a couple of times
Apply the strel a couple of times with an erosion operator to your original image to close your figure:
for i=1:20
im1 = imerode(im1,strel);
end
4. Dilate the image to get back to original shape
Next step is to dilate the image to get back to your original outer shape:
for i=1:20
im1 = imdilate(im1,strel);
end
Final result
The final result should be suitable to get a sufficiently precise center or gravity.
I'm trying to find a starting point, but I can't seem to find the right answer. I'd be very grateful for some guidance. I also don't know the proper terminology, hence the title.
I took an image of a bag with a black background behind it.
And I want to extract the bag, similar to this.
And if possible, find the center, like this.
Essentially, I want to be able to extract the blob of pixels and then find the center point.
I know these are two separate questions, but I figured if someone can do the latter, then they can do the first. I am using MATLAB, but would like to write my own code and not use their image processing functions, like edge(). What methods/algorithms can I use? Any papers/links would be nice (:
Well, assuming that your image only consists of a black background and a bag inside it, a very common way to perform what you're asking is to threshold the image, then find the centroid of all of the white pixels.
I did a Google search and the closest thing that I can think of that matches what you want looks like this:
http://ak.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/3455555/preview/stock-footage-single-blank-gray-shopping-bag-loop-rotate-on-black-background.jpg
This image is RGB for some reason, even though it's grayscale so we're going to convert this to grayscale. I'm assuming you can't use any built-in MATLAB functions and so rgb2gray is out. You can still implement it yourself though as rgb2gray implements the SMPTE Rec. 709 standard.
Once we read in the image, you can threshold the image and then find the centroid of all of the white pixels. That can be done using find to determine the non-zero row and column locations and then you'd just find the mean of both of them separately. Once we do that, we can show the image and plot a red circle where the centroid is located. As such:
im = imread('http://ak.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/3455555/preview/stock-footage-single-blank-gray-shopping-bag-loop-rotate-on-black-background.jpg');
%// Convert colour image to grayscale
im = double(im);
im = 0.299*im(:,:,1) + 0.587*im(:,:,2) + 0.114*im(:,:,3);
im = uint8(im);
thresh = 30; %// Choose threshold here
%// Threshold image
im_thresh = im > thresh;
%// Find non-zero locations
[rows,cols] = find(im_thresh);
%// Find the centroid
mean_row = mean(rows);
mean_col = mean(cols);
%// Show the image and the centroid
imshow(im); hold on;
plot(mean_col, mean_row, 'r.', 'MarkerSize', 18);
When I run the above code, this is what we get:
Not bad! Now your next concern is the case of handling multiple objects. As you have intelligently determined, this code only detects one object. For the case of multiple objects, we're going to have to do something different. What you need to do is identify all of the objects in the image by an ID. This means that we need to create a matrix of IDs where each pixel in this matrix denotes which object the object belongs to. After, we iterate through each object ID and find each centroid. This is performed by creating a mask for each ID, finding the centroid of that mask and saving this result. This is what is known as finding the connected components.
regionprops is the most common way to do this in MATLAB, but as you want to implement this yourself, I will defer you to my post I wrote a while ago on how to find the connected components of a binary image:
How to find all connected components in a binary image in Matlab?
Mind you, that algorithm is not the most efficient one so it may take a few seconds, but I'm sure you don't mind the wait :) So let's deal with the case of multiple objects now. I also found this image on Google:
We'd threshold the image as normal, then what's going to be different is performing a connected components analysis, then we iterate through each label and find the centroid. However, an additional constraint that I'm going to enforce is that we're going to check the area of each object found in the connected components result. If it's less than some number, this means that the object is probably attributed to quantization noise and we should skip this result.
Therefore, assuming that you took the code in the above linked post and placed it into a function called conncomptest which has the following prototype:
B = conncomptest(A);
So, take the code in the referenced post, and place it into a function called conncomptest.m with a function header such that:
function B = conncomptest(A)
where A is the input binary image and B is the matrix of IDs, you would do something like this:
im = imread('http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get2/I0000dqEHPhmGs.w/fit=1000x750/84483552.jpg');
im = double(im);
im = 0.299*im(:,:,1) + 0.587*im(:,:,2) + 0.114*im(:,:,3);
im = uint8(im);
thresh = 30; %// Choose threshold here
%// Threshold image
im_thresh = im > thresh;
%// Perform connected components analysis
labels = conncomptest(im_thresh);
%// Find the total number of objects in the image
num_labels = max(labels(:));
%// Find centroids of each object and show the image
figure;
imshow(im);
hold on;
for idx = 1 : num_labels
%// Find the ith object mask
mask = labels == idx;
%// Find the area
arr = sum(mask(:));
%// If area is less than a threshold
%// don't process this object
if arr < 50
continue;
end
%// Else, find the centroid normally
%// Find non-zero locations
[rows,cols] = find(mask);
%// Find the centroid
mean_row = mean(rows);
mean_col = mean(cols);
%// Show the image and the centroid
plot(mean_col, mean_row, 'r.', 'MarkerSize', 18);
end
We get:
I have no intention of detracting from Ray's (#rayryeng) excellent advice and, as usual, beautifully crafted, reasoned and illustrated answer, however I note that you are interested in solutions other than Matlab and actually want to develop your own code, so I though I would provide some additional options for you.
You could look to the excellent ImageMagick, which is installed in most Linux distros and available for OS X, other good operating systems and Windows. It includes a "Connected Components" method and if you apply it to this image:
like this at the command-line:
convert bags.png -threshold 20% \
-define connected-components:verbose=true \
-define connected-components:area-threshold=600 \
-connected-components 8 -auto-level output.png
The output will be:
Objects (id: bounding-box centroid area mean-color):
2: 630x473+0+0 309.0,252.9 195140 srgb(0,0,0)
1: 248x220+0+0 131.8,105.5 40559 srgb(249,249,249)
7: 299x231+328+186 507.5,304.8 36620 srgb(254,254,254)
3: 140x171+403+0 458.0,80.2 13671 srgb(253,253,253)
12: 125x150+206+323 259.8,382.4 10940 srgb(253,253,253)
8: 40x50+339+221 357.0,248.0 1060 srgb(0,0,0)
which shows 6 objects, one per line, and gives the bounding boxes, centroids and mean-colour of each. So, the 3rd line means a box 299 pixels wide by 231 pixels tall, with its top-left corner at 328 across from the top-left of the image and 186 pixels down from the top-left corner.
If I draw in the bounding boxes, you can see them here:
The centroids are also listed for you.
The outout image from the command above is like this, showing each shape shaded in a different shade of grey. Note that the darkest one has come up black so is VERY hard to see - nearly impossible :-)
If, as you say, you wish to look at writing your own connected component code, you could look at my code in another answer of mine... here
Anyway, I hope this helps and you see it just as an addition to the excellent answer Ray has already provided.
I was working on my image processing problem with detecting coins.
I have some images like this one here:
and wanted to separate the falsely connected coins.
We already tried the watershed method as stated on the MATLAB-Homepage:
the-watershed-transform-strategies-for-image-segmentation.html
especially since the first example is exactly our problem.
But instead we get a somehow very messed up separation as you can see here:
We already extracted the area of the coin using the regionprops Extrema parameter and casting the watershed only on the needed area.
I'd appreciate any help with the problem or even another method of getting it separated.
If you have the Image Processing Toolbox, I can also suggest the Circular Hough Transform through imfindcircles. However, this requires at least version R2012a, so if you don't have it, this won't work.
For the sake of completeness, I'll assume you have it. This is a good method if you want to leave the image untouched. If you don't know what the Hough Transform is, it is a method for finding straight lines in an image. The circular Hough Transform is a special case that aims to find circles in the image.
The added advantage of the circular Hough Transform is that it is able to detect partial circles in an image. This means that those regions in your image that are connected, we can detect them as separate circles. How you'd call imfindcircles is in the following fashion:
[centers,radii] = imfindcircles(A, radiusRange);
A would be your binary image of objects, and radiusRange is a two-element array that specifies the minimum and maximum radii of the circles you want to detect in your image. The outputs are:
centers: A N x 2 array that tells you the (x,y) co-ordinates of each centre of a circle that is detected in the image - x being the column and y being the row.
radii: For each corresponding centre detected, this also gives the radius of each circle detected. This is a N x 1 array.
There are additional parameters to imfindcircles that you may find useful, such as the Sensitivity. A higher sensitivity means that it is able to detect circular shapes that are more non-uniform, such as what you are showing in your image. They aren't perfect circles, but they are round shapes. The default sensitivity is 0.85. I set it to 0.9 to get good results. Also, playing around with your image, I found that the radii ranged from 50 pixels to 150 pixels. Therefore, I did this:
im = im2bw(imread('http://dennlinger.bplaced.net/t06-4.jpg'));
[centers,radii] = imfindcircles(im, [50 150], 'Sensitivity', 0.9);
The first line of code reads in your image directly from StackOverflow. I also convert this to logical or true black and white as the image you uploaded is of type uint8. This image is stored in im. Next, we call imfindcircles in the method that we described.
Now, if we want to visualize the detected circles, simply use imshow to show your image, then use the viscircles to draw the circles in the image.
imshow(im);
viscircles(centers, radii, 'DrawBackgroundCircle', false);
viscircles by default draws the circles with a white background over the contour. I want to disable this because your image has white circles and I don't want to show false contouring. This is what I get with the above code:
Therefore, what you can take away from this is the centers and radii variables. centers will give you the centre of each detected circle while radii will tell you what the radii is for each circle.
Now, if you want to simulate what regionprops is doing, we can iterate through all of the detected circles and physically draw them onto a 2D map where each circle would be labeled by an ID number. As such, we can do something like this:
[X,Y] = meshgrid(1:size(im,2), 1:size(im,1));
IDs = zeros(size(im));
for idx = 1 : numel(radii)
r = radii(idx);
cen = centers(idx,:);
loc = (X - cen(1)).^2 + (Y - cen(2)).^2 <= r^2;
IDs(loc) = idx;
end
We first define a rectangular grid of points using meshgrid and initialize an IDs array of all zeroes that is the same size as the image. Next, for each pair of radii and centres for each circle, we define a circle that is centered at this point that extends out for the given radius. We then use these as locations into the IDs array and set it to a unique ID for that particular circle. The result of IDs will be that which resembles the output of bwlabel. As such, if you want to extract the locations of where the idx circle is, you would do:
cir = IDs == idx;
For demonstration purposes, this is what the IDs array looks like once we scale the IDs such that it fits within a [0-255] range for visibility:
imshow(IDs, []);
Therefore, each shaded circle of a different shade of gray denotes a unique circle that was detected with imfindcircles.
However, the shades of gray are probably a bit ambiguous for certain coins as this blends into the background. Another way that we could visualize this is to apply a different colour map to the IDs array. We can try using the cool colour map, with the total number of colours to be the number of unique circles + 1 for the background. Therefore, we can do something like this:
cmap = cool(numel(radii) + 1);
RGB = ind2rgb(IDs, cmap);
imshow(RGB);
The above code will create a colour map such that each circle gets mapped to a unique colour in the cool colour map. The next line applies a mapping where each ID gets associated with a colour with ind2rgb and we finally show the image.
This is what we get:
Edit: the following solution is more adequate to scenarios where one does not require fitting the exact circumferences, although simple heuristics could be used to approximate the radii of the coins in the original image based on the centers found in the eroded one.
Assuming you have access to the Image Processing toolbox, try imerode on your original black and white image. It will apply an erosion morphological operator to your image. In fact, the Matlab webpage with the documentation of that function has an example strikingly similar to your problem/image and they use a disk structure.
Run the following code (based on the example linked above) assuming the image you submitted is called ima.jpg and is local to the code:
ima=imread('ima.jpg');
se = strel('disk',50);
eroded = imerode(ima,se);
imshow(eroded)
and you will see the image that follows as output. After you do this, you can use bwlabel to label the connected components and compute whatever properties you may want, for example, count the number of coins or detect their centers.
How do I separate the two connected circles in the image below, using MATLAB? I have tried using imerode, but this does not give good results. Eroding does not work, because in order to erode enough to separate the circles, the lines disappear or become mangled. In other starting pictures, a circle and a line overlap, so isolating the overlapping objects won't work either.
The image shows objects identified by bwboundaries, each object painted a different color. As you can see, the two light blue circles are joined, and I want to disjoin them, producing two separate circles. Thanks
I would recommend you use the Circular Hough Transform through imfindcircles. However, you need version 8 of the Image Processing Toolbox, which was available from version R2012a and onwards. If you don't have this, then unfortunately this won't work :(... but let's go with the assumption that you do have it. However, if you are using something older than R2012a, Dev-iL in his/her comment above linked to some code on MATLAB's File Exchange on an implementation of this, most likely created before the Circular Hough Transform was available: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/9168-detect-circles-with-various-radii-in-grayscale-image-via-hough-transform/
This is a special case of the Hough Transform where you are trying to find circles in your image rather than lines. The beauty with this is that you are able to find circles even when the circle is partially completed or overlapping.
I'm going to take the image that you provided above and do some post-processing on it. I'm going to convert the image to binary, and remove the border, which is white and contains the title. I'm also going to fill in any holes that result so that all of the objects are filled in with solid white. There is also some residual quantization noise after I do this step, so I'm going to a small opening with a 3 x 3 square element. After, I'm going to close the shapes with a 3 x 3 square element, as I see that there are noticeable gaps in the shapes. Therefore:
Therefore, directly reading in your image from where you've posted it:
im = imread('http://s29.postimg.org/spkab8oef/image.jpg'); %// Read in the image
im_gray = im2double(rgb2gray(im)); %// Convert to grayscale, then [0,1]
out = imclearborder(im_gray > 0.6); %// Threshold using 0.6, then clear the border
out = imfill(out, 'holes'); %// Fill in the holes
out = imopen(out, strel('square', 3));
out = imclose(out, strel('square', 3));
This is the image I get:
Now, apply the Circular Hough Transform. The general syntax for this is:
[centres, radii, metric] = imfindcircles(img, [start_radius, end_radius]);
img would be the binary image that contains your shapes, start_radius and end_radius would be the smallest and largest radius of the circles you want to find. The Circular Hough Transform is performed such that it will find any circles that are within this range (in pixels). The outputs are:
centres: Which returns the (x,y) positions of the centres of each circle detected
radii: The radius of each circle
metric: A measure of purity of the circle. Higher values mean that the shape is more probable to be a circle and vice-versa.
I searched for circles having a radius between 30 and 60 pixels. Therefore:
[centres, radii, metric] = imfindcircles(out, [30, 60]);
We can then demonstrate the detected circles, as well as the radii by a combination of plot and viscircles. Therefore:
imshow(out);
hold on;
plot(centres(:,1), centres(:,2), 'r*'); %// Plot centres
viscircles(centres, radii, 'EdgeColor', 'b'); %// Plot circles - Make edge blue
Here's the result:
As you can see, even with the overlapping circles towards the top, the Circular Hough Transform was able to detect two distinct circles in that shape.
Edit - November 16th, 2014
You wish to ensure that the objects are separated before you do bwboundaries. This is a bit tricky to do. The only way I can see you do this is if you don't even use bwboundaries at all and do this yourself. I'm assuming you'll want to analyze each shape's properties by themselves after all of this, so what I suggest you do is iterate through every circle you have, then place each circle on a new blank image, do a regionprops call on that shape, then append it to a separate array. You can also keep track of all of the circles by having a separate array that adds the circles one at a time to this array.
Once you've finished with all of the circles, you'll have a structure array that contains all of the measured properties for all of the measured circles you have found. You would use the array that contains only the circles from above, then use these and remove them from the original image so you get just the lines. You'd then call one more regionprops on this image to get the information for the lines and append this to your final structure array.
Here's the first part of the procedure I outlined above:
num_circles = numel(radii); %// Get number of circles
struct_reg = []; %// Save the shape analysis per circle / line here
%// For creating our circle in the temporary image
[X,Y] = meshgrid(1:size(out,2), 1:size(out,1));
%// Storing all of our circles in this image
circles_img = false(size(out));
for idx = 1 : num_circles %// For each circle we have...
%// Place our circle inside a temporary image
r = radii(idx);
cx = centres(idx,1); cy = centres(idx,2);
tmp = (X - cx).^2 + (Y - cy).^2 <= r^2;
% // Save in master circle image
circles_img(tmp) = true;
%// Do regionprops on this image and save
struct_reg = [struct_reg; regionprops(tmp)];
end
The above code may be a bit hard to swallow, but let's go through it slowly. I first figure out how many circles we have, which is simply looking at how many radii we have detected. I keep a separate array called struct_reg that will append a regionprops struct for each circle and line we have in our image. I use meshgrid to determine the (X,Y) co-ordinates with respect to the image containing our shapes so that I can draw one circle onto a blank image at each iteration. To do this, you simply need to find the Euclidean distance with respect to the centre of each circle, and set the pixels to true only if that location has its distance less than r. After doing this operation, you will have created only one circle and filtered all of them out. You would then use regionprops on this circle, add it to our circles_img array, which will only contain the circles, then continue with the rest of the circles.
At this point, we will have saved all of our circles. This is what circles_img looks like so far:
You'll notice that the circles drawn are clean, but the actual circles in the original image are a bit jagged. If we tried to remove the circles with this clean image, you will get some residual pixels along the border and you won't completely remove the circles themselves. To illustrate what I mean, this is what your image looks like if I tried to remove the circles with circles_img by itself:
... not good, right?
If you want to completely remove the circles, then do a morphological reconstruction through imreconstruct where you can use this image as the seed image, and specify the original image to be what we're working on. The job of morphological reconstruction is essentially a flood fill. You specify seed pixels, and an image you want to work on, and the job of imreconstruct is from these seeds, flood fill with white until we reach the boundaries of the objects that the seed pixels resided in. Therefore:
out_circles = imreconstruct(circles_img, out);
Therefore, we get this for our final reconstructed circles image:
Great! Now, use this and remove the circles from the original image. Once you do this, run regionprops again on this final image and append to your struct_reg variable. Obviously, save a copy of the original image before doing this:
out_copy = out;
out_copy(out_circles) = false;
struct_reg = [struct_reg; regionprops(out_copy)];
Just for sake of argument, this is what the image looks like with the circles removed:
Now, we have analyzed all of our shapes. Bear in mind I did the full regionprops call because I don't know exactly what you want in your analysis... so I just decided to give you everything.
Hope this helps!
erosion is the way to go. You should probably use a larger structuring element.
How about
1 erode
2 detect your objects
3 dilate each object for itself using the same structuring element