I need to count the number of black spots in an image(Not the percentage of black spots but the count). Can anyone suggest a step wise procedure that is used in image manipulation to count the spots.
Objective : Count black spots in an image
What I've done till now :
1. Converted image to grayscale
2. Read the pixels for their intensity values
3. I have set a threshold to find darker areas
Other implementations:
1. Gaussian blur
2. Histogram equalisations
What i have browsed :
Flood fill algorithms, Water shed algorithms
Thanks a lot..
you should first "label" the image, then count the number of labels you have found.
the label operation is the first operation done in a blob analysis operation: it groups similar adjacent pixels into a single object, and assign a value to this object. the condition for grouping generally is a background/foreground distinction: the label operation will group adjacent pixels which are part of the foreground, where background is defined as pure black or pure white, and foreground is any pixel whose color is not the color of the background.
the label operation is pretty easy to implement and requires not much resources.
_(see the wikipedia article, or this page for more information on labelling. a good paper on the implementation of the label operation is "Two Strategies to Speed up Connected Component Labeling Algorithms" by Kesheng Wu, Ekow Otoo and Kenji Suzuki)_
after labelling, count the number of labels (you can even count the labels while labelling), and you have the number of "black spots".
the next step is defining what a black spot is: converting your input image into a grayscale image (by converting it to HSL and using the luminance plane for example) then applying a threshold should do it. if the illumination of your input image is not even, you may need a better thresholding algorithm (a form of adaptive threshold)...
It sounds like you want to label the black spots (Blobs) using a binary image labelling algorithm. This should give you a place to start
Related
I need to implement an image segmentation function in MATLAB based on the principles of the connected components algorithm, but with a few modifications. This is intended for very simple, 2D images, with a background color and some objects in different colors.
The idea is that, taking the image as a matrix, I provide a tool to select the background color (it will vary for every image). Then, when the value of the color of the background of the image is selected, I have to segment all the objects in the image, and the result should be a labeled matrix, of the same size of the image, with 0's for the background, and a different number for each object.
This is a graphic example of what I mean:
I understand the idea of how to do it, but I do not know how to implement it on MATLAB. For each pixel (matrix position) I should mark it as visited and then if the value corresponds to the one of the background, assign 0, if not, assign another value. The objects can be formed by different colors, so in the end, I need to segment groups of adjacent pixels, whatever their color is. Also I have to use 8-connectivity, in order to count the green object of the example image as only one object and not 4 different ones. And also, the objects should be counted from top to bottom, and from left to right.
Is there a simple way of doing this in MATLAB? I know the bwlabel function, but it works for binary images only, so I'd like to adapt it to my case.
once you know the background color, you can easily convert your image into a binary mask of the same size:
bw=img!=bg_color;
Once you have a binary mask you can call bwlavel with 8-connectivity argument as you suggested yourself.
Note: you might want to convert your color image from RGB representation to an indexed image using rgb2ind before processing.
I have scanned copies of currency notes from which I need to extract only the rectangular notes.
Although the scanned copies have a very blank background, the note itself can be rotated or aligned correctly. I'm using matlab.
Example input:
Example output:
I have tried using thresholding and canny/sobel edge detection to no avail.
I also tried the solution given here but it detects the entire image for cropping and it would not work for rotated images.
PS: My primary objective is to determine the denomination of the currency. There are a couple of methods I thought I could use:
Color based, since all currency notes have varying primary colors.
The advantage of this method is that it's independent of the
rotation or scale of the input image.
Detect the small black triangle on the lower left corner of the note. This shape is unique
for each denomination.
Calculating the difference between 2 images. Since this is a small project, all input images will be of the same dpi and resolution and hence, once aligned, the difference between the input and the true images can give a rough estimate.
Which method do you think is the most viable?
It seems you are further advanced than you looked (seeing you comments) which is good! Im going to show you more or less the way you can go to solve you problem, however im not posting the whole code, just the important parts.
You have an image quite cropped and segmented. First you need to ensure that your image is without holes. So fill them!
Iinv=I==0; % you want 1 in money, 0 in not-money;
Ifill=imfill(Iinv,8,'holes'); % Fill holes
After that, you want to get only the boundary of the image:
Iedge=edge(Ifill);
And in the end you want to get the corners of that square:
C=corner(Iedge);
Now that you have 4 corners, you should be able to know the angle of this rotated "square". Once you get it do:
Irotate=imrotate(Icroped,angle);
Once here you may want to crop it again to end up just with the money! (aaah money always as an objective!)
Hope this helps!
I would like to check whether an image has a lot of homogeneous areas. Therefore I would like to get some kind of value of an image that declares a ratio for images depending on the amount/size of homogeneous areas (e.g. that value could have a range from 0 to 5).
Instead of a value there could be some kind of classification as well.
[many homogeneous areas -> value/class 5 ; few homogeneous areas -> value/class 0]
I would like to do that in perl. Is there a package/function or something like that?
What you want seems to be an area of image processing research which I am not familiar with. However, GraphicsMagick's mogrify utility has a -segment option:
Use -segment to segment an image by analyzing the histograms of the color components and identifying units that are homogeneous with the fuzzy c-means technique. The scale-space filter analyzes the histograms of the three color components of the image and identifies a set of classes. The extents of each class is used to coarsely segment the image with thresholding. The color associated with each class is determined by the mean color of all pixels within the extents of a particular class. Finally, any unclassified pixels are assigned to the closest class with the fuzzy c-means technique.
I don't know if this is any use to you. You might have to hit the library on this one, and read some research. You do have access to this through PerlMagick as well. However, it does not look like it gives access to the internals, but just produces an image based on parameters.
In my tests (without really understanding what the parameters do), photos turned entirely black, whereas PNG images with large areas of similar colors were reduced to a sort of an average color. Whether you can use that fact to develop a measure is an open question I am not going to investigate ;-)
I've converted a colored photo to black and white, and bolded the edges. Now i need to convert it back to its original color with the bolded edges. Is there any function in matlab which allows me to do so?
Once you remove the colour from an image, there is no possible way to automatically put it back. You're basically reducing a set of 16,777,216 colours to a set of 256 - on average each shade of grey has 65,536 equivalent colours, and without the original image there's no way to guess which it could be.
Now, if you were to take the bolded lines from your black-and-white image and paint them on top of the original coloured image, that might end up producing what you're looking for.
If what you are trying to do is to use some filter over the B/W image and then use that with the original color. I suggest you convert your image to a color space with Lightness channel that suits your needs (for example L*a*b* if you need the ligtness to be uniformly distributed regarding human recognition of differences) and apply your filter only over the Lightness channel.
I have 2 images that look nearly identical. The histogram for one (256 bins) has intensities distributed pretty evenly throughout. The other has intensities at the lowest and highest bin. Why would this be? Then wouldnt it appear binary (thats not the case)?
Think about it this way: Imagine you are taking a histogram of two grayscale images with each pixel represented by a color value 0-255. One image contains pixels that all have gray levels of 128. The second image contains a "checkerboard" pattern (pixels alternate between 0 and 255). If you step back far enough that you no longer see individual pixels, they will appear identical to the naked eye. Your brain "averages" the alternating black and white pixels into a field of gray.
This is what your images are doing. The first image has colors distributed evenly throughout the range and the second image has concentrations of specific colors, but if you calculate an average color for the image (and also for sub-sections within the image) you should see similar values for both.
Never trust in your eyes! They will always lie to you.
Consider this silly example that can be illustrative here. An X-Ray 'photo' is nothing more than black and white dots. But as they are small and mixed along the image, your eyes see different shades of gray.
The same can happen in a digital image, where, although the pixels may have the same size, then can be black and white and 'distributed' in the image in such a way that you see it as having more graylevels. This is called halftone.
Without seeing the images it's hard to say, but it sounds like the second may be slightly clipped.
The difference also could just be a slight difference in contrast in the images that's no visible to the naked eye.