Find out first circle in an image on Matlab (wrt. y-axis) - matlab

Question

I'm using Matlab. I have a 2-D Binary image/array. like this
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0
0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
I want to find out center of very first white block/Circle with respect to y-axis
Answer of the above image will be.
0 1 0
1 1 1
0 1 0
Anyone who have have a simplest solution for this.

Answer 1

If you are looking for exact matches of the template, you can use a moving filter, one example is:
H=[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0;
0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0;
0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0;
0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0;
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0;
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0];
b=[0 1 0;
1 1 1;
0 1 0];
C=filter2(b,H, 'same');
[x,y]=find(C==max(max(C)));
x and y are the locations of your template in the order that it appears from the top left corner of your array.
Edit: if you have the Image Processing Toolbox and are looking for a less strict way of finding objects that have a roughly circular shape you can use regionprops with the 'Centroid' and 'Eccentricity' arguments with the bwconncomp function.
ObjectStats=regionprops(bwconncomp(H,4), 'Centroid', 'Eccentricity');
Objects with an 'Eccentricity' of 0 (or close to 0) will be the circles.
idx=find(cell2mat({ObjectStats.Eccentricity})==0); % Change ==0 to <0.2 or something to make it less strict.
ctrs={ObjectStats.Centroid};
>> ctrs{1,idx(1)}
ans =
7 3
Note that in your case, a lone pixel is an object with an eccentricity of 0, it is the smallest 'circle' that you can find. If you need to define a minimum size, use the 'Area' property of regionprops

Answer 2

You can do this with a simple 2 dimensional convolution. It will "overlay" the filter along a larger matrix and multiply the filter by the values it is overlaying. If the product is equal to the sum of the filter, then you know you found a match.
Here is some simple code.
mat = [0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0
0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0];
filt = [0 1 0
1 1 1
0 1 0];
[row,col] = find(conv2(mat,filt,'same') == sum(filt(:)))