Maybe I'm asking this too soon in my research, but I'd better know if this is possible sooner than later.
Imagine I have the following square printed on a paper on top of a table:
The table is brown, so it does not match with any of the colors in the square. Is there a way for me, from a common iPhone camera (non-stereo view), to figure out the distance and angle from which Im looking at the square in the table?
In the end what I'm looking for is being able to draw a 3D square on top of this one using the camera image, but I'm not sure if I am going to be able to figure out the distance and position of the object in space using only a 2D image. Any hints are well appreciated.
Short answer: http://weblog.bocoup.com/javascript-augmented-reality
Big answer:
First posterize, Then vectorize, With the vectors in your power you may need to do some math tricks to define, based on the vectors position, the perspective and then the camera position.
Maybe this help:
www.pixastic.com/lib/docs/actions/posterize/
github.com/selead/cl-vectorizer
vectormagic.com/home
autotrace.sourceforge.net
www.scipy.org/PyLab
raphaeljs.com/
technabob.com/blog/2007/12/29/video-games-get-vectorized/
superuser.com/questions/88415/is-there-an-open-source-alternative-to-vector-magic
Oughta be possible. Scan the image for the red/blue/yellow pattern, then do edge detection to figure out how warped the squares are (they'll be parallelograms in anything but straight-on view). Distance would depend on the camera's zoom setting and scan resolution. But basically you'd count how many pixels are visible in each of the squares, run that past the camera's specs and you should be able to determine a rough distance.
Related
I am using an API to analyze faces in Matlab, where I get for each picture a 3X3 rotation matrix of the face's orientation, telling which direction the head is pointing.
I am trying to normalize the image according to that matrix, so that it will be distorted to get the image of the face's plane. This is something like 'undoing' the projection of the face to the camera plane. For example, if the head is directed a little to the left, it will stretch the left side to (more or less) preserve the face's original proportions.
Tried using 'affine2d' and 'projective2d' with 'imwarp', but it didn't achieve that goal
Achieving your goal with simple tools like affine transformations seems impossible to me since a face is hardly a flat surface. An extreme example: Imagine the camera recording a profile view of someone's head. How are you going to reconstruct the missing half of the face?
There have been successful attempts to change the orientation of faces in images and real-time video, but the methods used are quite complex:
[We] propose a gaze correction method that needs just a
single webcam. We apply recent shape deformation techniques
to generate a 3D face model that matches the user’s face. We
then render a gaze-corrected version of this face model and
seamlessly insert it into the original image.
(Giger et al., https://graphics.ethz.ch/Downloads/Publications/Papers/2014/Gig14a/Gig14a.pdf)
I have a stack of images with a bar close to the center. As the stack progresses the bar pivots around one end and the entire stack contains images with the bar rotated at many different angles up to 45 degrees above or below horizontal.
As shown here:
I'm looking for a way to rotate the bar and/or entire image and align everything horizontally before I do my other processing. Ideally this would be done in Matlab / imageJ / ImageMagick. I'm currently trying to work out a method using first Canny edge detection, followed by a Hough transform, followed by an image rotation, but I'm hoping this is a specific case of a more general problem which has already been solved.
If you have the image processing toolbox you can use regionprops with the 'Orientation' property to find the angle.
http://www.mathworks.com/help/images/ref/regionprops.html#bqkf8ji
The problem you are solving is known as image registration or image alignment.
-The first thing you need to due is to treshold the image, so you end up with a black and white image. This will simplify the process.
-Then you need to calculate the mass center of the imgaes and then translate them to match each others centers.
Then you need to rotate the images to matcheach other. This could be done using the principal axis measure. The principal axis will give you the two axis that explain most of the variance in the population. Which will basically give you a vector showing which way your bar is pointing. Then all you need to due is rotate the bars in the same direction.
-After the principal axis transformation you can try rotating the pictues a little bit more in each direction to try and optimise the rotation.
All the way through your translation and rotation you need a measure for showing you how good a fit your tranformation is. This measure can be many thing. If the picture is black and white a simple subtraction of the pictures is enough. Otherwise you can use measures like mutual information.
...you can also look at procrustes analysis see this link for a matlab function http://www.google.dk/search?q=gpa+image+analysis&oq=gpa+image+analysis&sugexp=chrome,mod=9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#hl=da&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&q=matlab+procrustes+analysis&oq=matlab+proanalysis&gs_l=serp.3.1.0i7i30l4.5399.5883.2.9481.3.3.0.0.0.0.105.253.2j1.3.0...0.0...1c.1.5UpjL3-8aC0&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.Yms&fp=afcd637d8ae07bde&bpcl=40096503&biw=1600&bih=767
You might want to look into the SIFT transform.
You should take as your image the rectangle that represents a worst case guess for your bar and determine the rotation matrix for that.
See http://www.vlfeat.org/overview/sift.html
Use the StackReg plugin of ImageJ. I'm not 100% sure but I think it already comes installed with FIJI (FIJI Is Just ImageJ).
EDIT: I think I have misread your question. That is not a stack of images you are trying to fix, right? In that case, a simple approach (probably not the most efficient but definetly works), is the following algorithm:
threshold the image (seems easy, your background is always white)
get a long horizontal line as a structuring element and dilate the image with it
rotate the structuring element and keep dilating image, measuring the size of the dilation.
the angle that maximizes it, is the rotation angle you'll need to fix your image.
There are several approaches to this problem as suggested by other answers. One approach possibly similar to what you are already trying, is to use Hough transform. Hough transform is good at detecting line orientations. Combining this with morphological processing and image rotation after detecting the angle you can create a system that corrects for angular variations. The basic steps would be
Use Morphological operations to make the bar a single line blob.
Use Hough transform on this image.
Find the maximum in the transform output and use that to find orientation angle.
Use the angle to fix original image.
A full example which comes with Computer Vision System Toolbox for this method. See
http://www.mathworks.com/help/vision/examples/rotation-correction-1.html
you can try givens or householder transform, I prefer givens.
it require an angle, using cos(angle) and sin(angle) to make the givens matrix.
I am wondering if there is a way to translate the underlying matrix of a layer much like you can in ActionScript3.
In AS3 I can get the transform of a layer and shift it to, let's say, make the center of the layer the anchor point, rather than the upper-left corner.
The reason I ask is because I am trying to rotate a layer (containing a square) along a diagonal axis. I thought it might be easy if I could rotate the matrix by 45 degrees, then I could just rotate around the X-axis and be done.
But I cannot figure out how to do that.
Any help, greatly appreciate, as always.
Cheers,
Chris
Use a CGAffineTransform.
Edit:
I am afraid I don't know what you mean by "rotating an object along a diagonal axis". What you most likely need to do is to concatenate two or more transforms.
See figure 5-8 in Quartz 2D programming Guide The concatenation of two transforms creates the appearance of the image rotating around its lower left corner.
I have a computer vision set up with two cameras. One of this cameras is a time of flight camera. It gives me the depth of the scene at every pixel. The other camera is standard camera giving me a colour image of the scene.
We would like to use the depth information to remove some areas from the colour image. We plan on object, person and hand tracking in the colour image and want to remove far away background pixel with the help of the time of flight camera. It is not sure yet if the cameras can be aligned in a parallel set up.
We could use OpenCv or Matlab for the calculations.
I read a lot about rectification, Epipolargeometry etc but I still have problems to see the steps I have to take to calculate the correspondence for every pixel.
What approach would you use, which functions can be used. In which steps would you divide the problem? Is there a tutorial or sample code available somewhere?
Update We plan on doing an automatic calibration using known markers placed in the scene
If you want robust correspondences, you should consider SIFT. There are several implementations in MATLAB - I use the Vedaldi-Fulkerson VL Feat library.
If you really need fast performance (and I think you don't), you should think about using OpenCV's SURF detector.
If you have any other questions, do ask. This other answer of mine might be useful.
PS: By correspondences, I'm assuming you want to find the coordinates of a projection of the same 3D point on both your images - i.e. the coordinates (i,j) of a pixel u_A in Image A and u_B in Image B which is a projection of the same point in 3D.
I have two images. In one of the images, my eye is in the center position and in the other image, it is in the left. How do I find out whether my eye is in the left or the right?
I am using MATLAB. Are there any functions for this?
A simple solution is to try to detect the iris using circular Hough Transform.
You can find a lot materials out there. To name a few, these two fileexchange submissions:
Hough Transform for circle
detection
Circle Detection via Standard Hough
Transform
This sounds like Eye tracking implemented in MATLAB which is a fairly popular research topic.
If you want a more detailed answer, please answer the following questions:
Do you know the coordinates of your eye in the first image?
What kind of motion is there between the two images? Rotation/translation/scaling/...?
Do you want this to be real-time?
What is the resolution of the images?
Are there going to be more eyes in the image apart from yours?
If you are willing to select the eye in one image you can use template matching to find it in others (for example you can mark it in the first frame of a video and then find it in all other frames).
Look at the normxcor2 function in matlab:
http://www.nd.edu/~hpcc/solaris8_usr_local/src/matlab6.1/help/toolbox/images/normxcorr2.html
This technique is robust to constant illumination change, but will fail if the appearance of the eye changes significantly between the image you took the template from and the image you are searching in.
If you are going to search for the eye in a lot of frames (for example, eye tracking from a webcam) then you should look at stronger techniques such as the Kalman Filter or the Particle Filter (aka Condensation Filter in computer vision)
By using Color Distance Maps, the skin and non skin area can be differentiated and thus the non skin area contains the iris. From the iris, the whole eye could be detected. Hope it works.
You should also have a look at Eye Ball Detection in MATLAB , they have detected eyes first and then detected the EyeBall.