I have an 2d-image and I want to fit several lines to the object that is represented by this image. The lines are connected and can only have angles in certain intervals between each other.
I know, that you can fit one line to data points using least squares. But I do not know how to fit several connected lines simultaneously to points while at the same time obeying the angle intervals.
How would you solve this problem programmatically? I would also accept an answer, given me catchwords (and maybe links) that will point me to my solution.
Here is an example image. For instance, I might want to fit 4 lines with length x,y,z,w to the object represented by the largest component in the image. Unfortunately, the object is not always as clearly visible as it is here, but this will do for now :)
Green lines approximate lines I would be looking for (sorry, they are not very straight ;) ).
You can fit a degree 1 B-spline curve to data points extracted from your image. A degree 1 B-spline curve is conceptually a composition of multiple line segments, which matches what you want. Additional angle constraints between lines can be imposed onto control points of this degree 1 B-spline curve but doing so will turn your unconstrained fitting into a constrained one, which will increase the complexity of algorithm.
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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.
I want an approach and method to separate the connected lines. Here is my image
and here is the result I would like
How do I solve that problem? Thank you in advance!
Sincerely
The watershed would be a problem as you have shown it produces multiple segmentations of the original line. Originally the watershed works for grains due to their convex shapes, while here in the case of lines there is no global convex shape to cause a good fragmentation, it would be good to use the watershed with some constraints.
It would be good to try solving a simpler version of the problem. Imagine that there are only horizontal and vertical lines possible. So in this case it would mean separating the horizontal long lines by cutting the short vertical lines (length measured by projecting on the x-y gradient). The basic hint is to use the gradient/slope of these lines to help decide where to cut - orthogonal line. In the more general case the problem requires a measure of local curvature or geodesic distance.
A simpler solution(in edit) is just removing the junction points in the skeleton you have.
This would cause some of your lines which are connected horizontally to be segmented but i guess this can be fixed with some end point filtering. A simple try here:
J = imread('input.png');
B = bwmorph(J,'branchpoints');
L = bwlabel((J>0).*(~B),8); %removing the branch points from the skeleton
Label = label2rgb(bwlabel((J>0).*(~B),8),'jet',[0 0 0]);
Final labeled line components. This requires further end point prefiltering, direction based filtering.
The parts of the contour that should be separated are basically the sections that are not in the same direction as most of the rest of the contour.
I can only give you a basic way to do this without specific code or functions and I doubt it is the most efficient, but since there are not too many answers here...also this is using the knowledge of the problem and the solution...
Find the connected contour with all its branches as a set of pixel coordinates (which represent the line as a single pixel wide contour)
Convert the contour list to a set of angles between each adjacent pixel coordinate
Optional: Filter out the high frequency components with an averaging filter
Histogram the angles to find the angle most of the contour lines lay on (call it the common angle)
Search the contour looking for sections that go from +/-common angle (tolerance of +/-30 degrees) to the negative of that (-/+ common angle with similar tolerance).
For each section delete the pixels associated with angles between the two thresholds above (i.e. common angle + 30 deg to -common angle - 30 degrees.
Repeat for each connected contour
Hope this helps some
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).
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.
What coding techniques would allow me to to differentiate between circles, rectangles, and triangles in black and white image bitmaps?
You could train an Artificial Neural Network to classify the shapes :P
If noise is low enough to extract curves, approximations can be used: for each shape select parameters giving least error (he method of least squares may help here) and then compare these errors...
If the image is noisy, I would consider Hough transform - it may be used to detect shapes with small count of parameters, like circle (harder for rectangles and triangles).
just an idea off of the top of my head: scan the (pixel) image line-by-line, pixel-by-pixel. If you encounter the first white pixel (assuming it has a black background) you keep it's position as a starting point and look at the eight pixels surrounding it in every direction for the next white pixel. If you find an adjacent second pixel you can establish a directional vector between those two pixels.
Now repeat this until the direction of your vector changes (or the change is above a certain threshold). Keep the last point before the change as the endpoint of your first line and repeat the process for the next line.
Then calculate the angle between the two lines and store it. Now trace the third line. Calculate the angle between the 2nd and 3rd line as well.
If both angles are rectangular you probably found a rectangle, otherwise you probably found a triangle. If you can't find any straight line you could conclude that you found a circle.
I know the algorithm is a bit sketchy but I think (with some refinement) it could work if your image's quality is not too bad (too much noise, gaps in the lines etc.).
You are looking for the Hough Transform. For an implementation, try the AForge.NET framework. It includes circle and line hough transformations.