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.
Related
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
need some help here on image processing. I'm using Matlab and try to segment the following figure based on the two major peaks (in yellow). The color yellow means higher value and blue means low value (on z-axis, or image color from 0 to 1 for your convenience). The ideal cut is roughly the line from point (1,75) to (120,105). But I want a systematic way to derive this rather than by observation.
My intuition was to first identify the two peaks (based on this), and then classify each point/pixel on this figure to the two peaks (the metric here is to compute the shortest Euclidean distance to the edge of the two peaks).
And I end up with the following fig.
As you can see, the cut is pretty much a straight line, which I'm not quite satisfied. Maybe I can use the orientation of the peak circle and somehow tilt the line.. but I'm not sure how to do so? Any clues? Thanks.
This is an Image segmentation problem.
you can use GMM Gaussian of Mixture Model to model the image.
in your case the number of components will be 2.
after you model the image by using this mixture, you can find the probability of each pixel P(pixel x belong to the first component or the second component)
check
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/272162
http://www.mathworks.com/help/stats/cluster-data-from-mixture-of-gaussian-distributions.html
I have a multiple plants in a single binary image. How would I identify each leaf in the image assuming that each leaf is approximately elliptical?
example input: http://i.imgur.com/BwhLVmd.png
I was thinking a good place to start would be finding the tip of each leaf and then getting the center of each plant. Then I could fit the curves starting from the tip and then going to the center. I've been looking online and saw something involving a watershed method, but I do not know where to begin with that idea.
You should be aware that these things are tricky to get working robustly - there will always be a failure case.
This said, I think your idea is not bad.
You could start as follows:
Identify the boundary curve of each plant (i.e. pixels with both foreground and background in their neighbourhood).
Compute the centroid of each plant.
Convert each plant boundary to a polar coordinate system, with the centroid as the origin. This amounts to setting up a coordinate system with the distance of each boundary curve point on the Y axis and the angle on the X axis.
In this representation of the boundary curve, try to identify maxima; these are the tips of the leaves. You will probably need to do some smoothing. Use the parts of the curve before and after the maxima the start fitting your ellipses or some other shape.
Generally, a polar coordinate system is always useful for analysing stuff thats roughly circular.
To fit you ellipses, once you have a rough initial position, I would probably try an EM-style approach.
I would do something like this (I is your binary image)
I=bwmorph(bwmorph(I, 'bridge'), 'clean');
SK=bwmorph(I, 'skel', Inf);
endpts = bwmorph(SK,'endpoints');
props=regionprops(I, 'All');
And then connect every segment from the centroids listed in props.centroid to the elements of endpts that should give you your leaves (petals?).
A bit of filtering is probably necessary, bwmorph is your friend. Have fun!
I have a system of finite size circular particles (say r=5cm) which I need to plot in a given domain (say L=5m). Since they are many, scatter is faster than any cyclic use of rectangle.
What is unclear to me is the correct way to define the diameter/radius of the circles/marker so to scale correctly with the domain geometry which is plotted as well. (By using rectangle, the diameter of the particle can be easily defined.)
Based on this answer, it is possible to have fine control of the marker size, although the real scaling is obscure to me.
Can anyone shed some light?
The SCATTER function expects its 'S' parameter to contain the marker
area in points squared. This area corresponds to the area of a square
bounding box around the marker.
The source is the technical solution "How do I specify the size of the markers created by the SCATTER plot in units proportional to the data being plotted in MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a)?"
Check out the code in the link.
The official documentation states:
MarkerSize
Marker size. Size of the marker in points. The default value is 6.
Note that one point is 1/72 of an inch, so it's an absolute measurement unit.
If you want to tune the marker sizes according to the axis scale of your plot, do a simple unit conversion: calibrate 1 tick in one of the axes to points (you can do it by trial and error), and then normalize all your marker sizes by it (it doesn't, however, occur to me how you'd keep the marker sizes relative to the plot's zoom level in a straightforward manner).
By the way, you can specify the sizes of the markers directly as the third parameter in the scatter command. With this, you can avoid the get and set manipulations mentioned in the answer to which have linked your question.
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).