How to find the distance between the only two points in an image produced by a grating like substance? - matlab

i need to find the distance between the two points.I can find the distance between them manually by the pixel to cm converter in the image processing tool box. But i want a code which detects the point positions in the image and calculate the distance.
More accurately speaking the image contains only three points one mid and the other two approximately distanced equally from it...

There might be a better way then this, but I hacked something similar together last night.
Use bwboundaries to find the objects in the image (the contiguous regions in a black/white image).
The second returned matrix, L, is the same image but with the regions numbered. So for the first point, you want to isolate all the pixels related to it,
L2 = (L==1)
Now find the center of that region (for object 1).
x1 = (1:size(L2,2))*sum(L2,1)'/size(L2,2);
y1 = (1:size(L2,1))*sum(L2,2)/size(L2,1);
Repeat that for all the regions in your image. You should have the center of mass of each point. I think that should do it for you, but I haven't tested it.

Related

matlab: limiting erosion on binary images

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

Matlab: separate connected components

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.

Matlab - Concatenation of overlapping blocks with weighted average

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.

how to find the center of the mandelbrot set

is it possible to find the center of the big black spot(the area which with the set?)
I've tried to loop through all points which are in the set, sum their locationד and eventually divided by the num of points which are in the set.
it didn't work as expected because the the set isn't formed, e.g its not a perfect sphere or a square therefore the center always changes. is there another way of finding the center?
thanks!
Look for centers of mandelbrot set hyperbolic components
http://fraktal.republika.pl/eigensolve.html
That shape is a perfect cardioid (no other similar shapes in the Mandelbrot set are perfect cardioids, they are somewhat distorted).
Check Wikipedia, you'll find the equation for calculating the cardioid itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardioid
Note, however that at the borders of the Mandelbrot map (where the black and non-black area meets) deciding whether a point belongs to the map or not, heavily depends on how many times you iterate z = z^2 + c. If you iterate it 50 times, the main cardioid will be smaller than if you iterate it 500 times because with 500 iteration more points at the border will go to infinity.

Segmenting 3D shapes out of thick "lines"

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.