Can someone explain to me the correlation function corr2 in MATLAB? I know that it is for 2D comparing similarities of objects, but in the equation I have doubts what it is A and B (probably matrices for comparison), and also Amn and Bmn.
I'm not sure how MATLAB executes this function, because I have found in several cases that the correlation is not executed for the entire image (matrix) but instead it divides the image into blocks and then compares blocks of one picture with blocks of another picture.
In MATLAB's documentation, the corr2 equation is not put as referral point to the way the equation itself is calculated, like in other functions in MATLAB's documentation, such as referring to what book it is taken from and where it is explained.
The correlation coefficient is a number representing the similarity between 2 images in relation with their respective pixel intensity.
As you pointed out this function is used to calculate this coefficient:
Here A and B are the images you are comparing, whereas the subscript indices m and n refer to the pixel location in the image. Basically what Matab does is to compute, for every pixel location in both images, the difference between the intensity value at that pixel and the mean intensity of the whole image, denoted as a letter with a straightline over it.
As Kostya pointed out, typing edit corr2 in the command window will show you the code used by Matlab to compute the correlation coefficient. The formula is basically this:
a = a - mean2(a);
b = b - mean2(b);
r = sum(sum(a.*b))/sqrt(sum(sum(a.*a))*sum(sum(b.*b)));
where:
a is the input image and b is the image you wish to compare to a.
If we break down the formula, we see that a - mean2(a) and b-mean2(b) are the elements in the numerator of the above equation. mean2(a) is equivalent to mean(mean(a)) or mean(a(:)), that is the mean intensity of the whole image. This is only calculated once.
The 3rd line of code calculates the coefficient. Here sum(sum(a.*b)) calculates the double-sum present in the formula element-wise, that is considering each pixel location separately. Be aware that using sum(a) calculates the sum in every column individually, hence in order to get a single value you need to apply sum twice.
That's pretty much the same happening in the denominator, however calculations are performed on a-mean2(a)^2 and b-mean2(b)^2. You can see this a some kind of normalization process in which you consider the pixel intensity difference among each individual image.
As for your last comment, you can break down an image into small blocks and calculate the correlation coefficient on them; that might save some time for very large images but since everything is vectorized the calculation is quite fast. It might be useful in distributed processing I guess. Of course the correlation coefficient between 2 blocks of images is not necessarily identical to that of the whole image.
For the sake of curiosity you can look at this paper which highlights some caveats in using the correlation coefficient for image comparison.
Hope that makes things a bit clearer!
Related
This question of mine is not tightly related to Matlab, but is relevant to it:
I'm looking how to fill in the matrix [[a,b,c],[d,e,f]] in a few nontrivial ways so that as many places as possible in
corrcoef([a,b,c],[d,e,f])
are zero. My attempts yield NaN result in most cases.
Given the current comments, you are trying to understand how two series of random draws from two distributions can have zero correlation. Specifically, exercise 4.6.9 to which you refer mentions draws from two normal distributions.
An issue with your approach is that you are hoping to derive a link between a theoretical property and experimentation, in this case using Matlab. And, as you seem to have noticed, unless you are looking at specific degenerate cases, your experimentation will fail. That is because although the true correlation parameter rho in the exercise might be zero, a sample of random draws will always have some level of correlation. Here is an illustration, and as you'll notice if you run it the actual correlations span the whole spectrum between -1 and 1 despite their average being zero (as it should be since both generators are pseudo-uncorrelated):
n=1e4;
experiment = nan(n,1);
for i=1:n
r = corrcoef(rand(4,1),rand(4,1));
experiment(i)=r(2);
end
hist(experiment);
title(sprintf('Average correlation: %.4f%%',mean(experiment)));
If you look at the definition of Pearson correlation in wikipedia, you will see that the only way this can be zero is when the numerator is zero, i.e. E[(X-Xbar)(Y-Ybar)]=0. Though this might be the case asymptotically, you will be hard-pressed to find a non-degenerate case where this will happen in a small sample. Nevertheless, to show you you can derive some such degenerate cases, let's dig a bit further. If you want the expectation of this product to be zero, you could make either the left or the right hand part zero when the other is non-zero. For one side to be zero, the draw must be exactly equal to the average of draws. Therefore we can imagine creating such a pair of variables using this technique:
we create two vectors of 4 variables, and alternate which draw will be equal to the average.
let's say we want X to average 1, and Y to average 2, and we make even-indexed draws equal to the average for X and odd-indexed draws equal to the average for Y.
one such generation would be: X=[0,1,2,1], Y=[2,0,2,4], and you can check that corrcoef([0,1,2,1],[2,0,2,4]) does in fact produce an identity matrix. This is because, every time a component of X is different than its average of 1, the component in Y is equal to its average of 2.
another example, where the average of X is 3 and that of Y is 4 is: X=[3,-5,3,11], Y=[1008,4,-1000,4]. etc.
If you wanted to know how to create samples from non-correlated distributions altogether, that would be and entirely different question, though (perhaps) more interesting in terms of understanding statistics. If this is your case, and given the exercise you mention discusses normal distributions, I would suggest you take a look at generating antithetic variables using the Box-Muller transform.
Happy randomizing!
Due to the nature of my problem, I want to evaluate the numerical implementations of the Radon transform in Matlab (i.e. different interpolation methods give different numerical values).
while trying to code my own Radon, and compare it to Matlab's output, I found out that my radon projection sizes are different than Matlab's.
So a bit of intuition of how I compute the amount if radon samples needed. Let's do the 2D case.
The idea is that the maximum size would be when the diagonal (in a rectangular shape at least) part is proyected in the radon transform, so diago=sqrt(size(I,1),size(I,2)). As we dont wan nothing out, n_r=ceil(diago). n_r should be the amount of discrete samples of the radon transform should be to ensure no data is left out.
I noticed that Matlab's radon output is always even, which makes sense as you would want a "ray" through the rotation center always. And I noticed that there are 2 zeros in the endpoints of the array in all cases.
So in that case, n_r=ceil(diago)+mod(ceil(diago)+1,2)+2;
However, it seems that I get small discrepancies with Matlab.
A MWE:
% Try: 255,256
pixels=256;
I=phantom('Modified Shepp-Logan',pixels);
rd=radon(I,pi/4);
size(rd,1)
s=size(I);
diagsize=sqrt(sum(s.^2));
n_r=ceil(diagsize)+mod(ceil(diagsize)+1,2)+2
rd=
367
n_r =
365
As Matlab's Radon transform is a function I can not look into, I wonder why could it be this discrepancy.
I took another look at the problem and I believe this is actually the right answer. From the "hidden documentation" of radon.m (type in edit radon.m and scroll to the bottom)
Grandfathered syntax
R = RADON(I,THETA,N) returns a Radon transform with the
projection computed at N points. R has N rows. If you do not
specify N, the number of points the projection is computed at
is:
2*ceil(norm(size(I)-floor((size(I)-1)/2)-1))+3
This number is sufficient to compute the projection at unit
intervals, even along the diagonal.
I did not try to rederive this formula, but I think this is what you're looking for.
This is a fairly specialized question, so I'll offer up an idea without being completely sure it is the answer to your specific question (normally I would pass and let someone else answer, but I'm not sure how many readers of stackoverflow have studied radon). I think what you might be overlooking is the floor function in the documentation for the radon function call. From the doc:
The radial coordinates returned in xp are the values along the x'-axis, which is
oriented at theta degrees counterclockwise from the x-axis. The origin of both
axes is the center pixel of the image, which is defined as
floor((size(I)+1)/2)
For example, in a 20-by-30 image, the center pixel is (10,15).
This gives different behavior for odd- or even-sized problems that you pass in. Hence, in your example ("Try: 255, 256"), you would need a different case for odd versus even, and this might involve (in effect) padding with a row and column of zeros.
I was given this task, I am a noob and need some pointers to get started with centroid calculation in Matlab:
Instead of an image first I was asked to simulate a Gaussian distribution(2 dimensional), add noise(random noise) and plot the intensities, now the position of the centroid changes due to noise and I need to bring it back to its original position by
-clipping level to get rid of the noise, noise reduction by clipping or smoothing, sliding average (lpf) (averaging filter 3-5 samples ), calculating the means or using Convolution filter kernel - which does matrix operations which represent the 2-D images
Since you are a noob, even if we wrote down the answer verbatim you probably won't understand how it works. So instead I'll do what you asked, give you pointers and you'll have to read the related documentation :
a) to produce a 2-d Gaussian use meshgrid or ndgrid
b) to add noise to the image look into rand ,randn or randi, depending what exactly you need.
c) to plot the intensities use imagesc
d) to find the centroid there are several ways, try to further search SO, you'll find many discussions. Also you can check TMW File exchange for different implementations for that.
Say, I have a cube of dimensions 1x1x1 spanning between coordinates (0,0,0) and (1,1,1). I want to generate a random set of points (assume 10 points) within this cube which are somewhat uniformly distributed (i.e. within certain minimum and maximum distance from each other and also not too close to the boundaries). How do I go about this without using loops? If this is not possible using vector/matrix operations then the solution with loops will also do.
Let me provide some more background details about my problem (This will help in terms of what I exactly need and why). I want to integrate a function, F(x,y,z), inside a polyhedron. I want to do it numerically as follows:
$F(x,y,z) = \sum_{i} F(x_i,y_i,z_i) \times V_i(x_i,y_i,z_i)$
Here, $F(x_i,y_i,z_i)$ is the value of function at point $(x_i,y_i,z_i)$ and $V_i$ is the weight. So to calculate the integral accurately, I need to identify set of random points which are not too close to each other or not too far from each other (Sorry but I myself don't know what this range is. I will be able to figure this out using parametric study only after I have a working code). Also, I need to do this for a 3D mesh which has multiple polyhedrons, hence I want to avoid loops to speed things out.
Check out this nice random vectors generator with fixed sum FEX file.
The code "generates m random n-element column vectors of values, [x1;x2;...;xn], each with a fixed sum, s, and subject to a restriction a<=xi<=b. The vectors are randomly and uniformly distributed in the n-1 dimensional space of solutions. This is accomplished by decomposing that space into a number of different types of simplexes (the many-dimensional generalizations of line segments, triangles, and tetrahedra.) The 'rand' function is used to distribute vectors within each simplex uniformly, and further calls on 'rand' serve to select different types of simplexes with probabilities proportional to their respective n-1 dimensional volumes. This algorithm does not perform any rejection of solutions - all are generated so as to already fit within the prescribed hypercube."
Use i=rand(3,10) where each column corresponds to one point, and each row corresponds to the coordinate in one axis (x,y,z)
I have two images I'm trying to co-register - ie, one could be of a ball in the centre of the picture, the other is of the same ball near the edge and I'm trying to find the numbed of pixels I have to move the second image so that the balls would be in the same place. (I'm actually using 3D MRI brain scans, but the principle is the same).
I've written a function that will move the ball left, right, up or down by a given number of pixels as well as another function that compares the correlation of the ball-in-the-centre image with the translated ball-at-the-edge image. When the two balls are in the same place the correlation function will return 0 and a number larger than 0 for other positions.
I'm trying to use fminsearch (documentation) to find the optimal translation for the correlation function's minimum (ie, the balls being in the same place) like so:
global reference_im unknown_im;
starting_trans = [0 0 0];
trans_vector = fminsearch(#correlate_images,starting_trans)
correlate_images.m:
function r = correlate_images(translate)
global reference_im unknown_im;
new_im = move_image(unknown_im,translate(1),translate(2),translate(3));
% This bit is unimportant to the question
% but you can see how I calculate my correlation
r = 1 - corr(reshape(new_im,[],1),reshape(reference_im,[],1));
There are two problems, firstly fminsearch insists on passing float values for the translation vector into the correlate_images function. Is there any way to inform it that only integers are necessary? (I would save a large number of cpu cycles!)
Secondly, when I run this program the resulting trans_vector is always the same as starting_trans - I assume this is because no minimum has been found, but is there another reason its just plain not working?
Many thanks!
EDIT
I've discovered what I think is the reason the output trans_vector is always the same as starting_trans. The fminsearch looks at the starting value, then a small increment in each direction from there, this small increment is always less than one, which means that the result from the correlation will be a perfect match (as the move_image will return the same as the input image for sub-pixel movements). I'm going to continue working on convincing matlab to only fminsearch over integer values!
First, I'd say that Matlab might not be the best tool for this problem. I'd look at Elastix, which is a pretty user-friendly wrapper around the registration functions in ITK. You get a variety of registration techniques, and the manuals for both programs do a good job of explaining the specifics of image registration.
Second, for this kind of simple translational registration, you can use the FFT. Forward transform both images, multiply the images together (pointwise! That is, use A .* B, not A * B, as those are different operations, and the first is what you want), and there should be a peak in the inverse transform whose offset from the origin is the translational amount you need. Numerical Recipes in C has a good explanation; here's a link to an index pdf. The speed difference between the FFT version and the direct correlation version is huge; the FFT is O(N log N), while the correlation method will be O (N * M), where M is the number of pixels in your search neighborhood. If you want to allow the entire image to be searched, then correlation becomes O (N*N), which will take much longer than the FFT version. Changing parameters from floats to integers won't solve the problem.
The reason the fminsearch function uses floats (if I can guess at the reasons behind the coders' decisions) is that for problems that aren't test problems (ie, spheres in a volume), you often need sub-pixel resolution to perform a correct registration. Take a look at the ITK documentation about the reasons behind this approach.
Third, I'd suggest that a good way to write this program in Matlab (if you still want to do so!) while still forcing integer correlations would be to avoid the fminsearch function, which will want to use floats. Try something like:
startXPos = -10; %these parameters dictate the size of your search neighborhood
startYPos = -10; %corresponds to M in the above explanation
endXPos = 10;
endYPos = 10;
optimalX = 0;
optimalY = 0;
maxCorrVal = 0;
for i=startXPos:endXPos
for j = startYPos:endYPos
%test the correlation of the two images here, where one image is shifted to another
currCorrVal = Correlate(image1, image2OffsetByiAndj);
if (currCorrVal > maxCorrVal)
maxCorrVal = currCorrVal;
optimalX = i;
optimalY = j;
end
end
end
From here, you just have to write the offset function. This way, you avoid the float problem, and you're also incrementing your translation vector (I don't see any way for that vector to move in your provided functions, which probably explains your lack of movement).
There is a very similar demo in the Image Processing Toolbox that uses the normalized cross-correlation function normxcorr2 to perform image registration. To avoid repeating the same thing, check out the demo directly:
Registering an Image Using Normalized Cross-Correlation