Create masking effect over a view - iphone

I would like to create a masking effect over a UIView in order to accomplish the following. I will display a sealed box in the screen and the user will be able to touch (scratch) the screen in order to reveal whats behind that image(UIView). Something similar to those lottery tickets where u r suppose to scratch some cover material thats on top of the results..
If someone could point me in the right direction would be awesome, I'm not sure how to start doing this...
thanks

Sorry I'm late. I made some example code which might be of help: https://github.com/oyiptong/CGScratch
drawnonward's approach works.

Pixel editing is usually done with a CGBitmapContext. In this case, I think you will want to create a grayscale bitmap that represents just the alpha channel of the scratch area. As the user scratches, you will paint in this bitmap.
To use a GCBitmapContext as the mask for an image, you must first create a masking image from the bitmap. Use CGImageMaskCreate and pass in a data provider that points to the same pixels used to create the bitmap. Then use CGImageCreateWithMask with your scratch off image and the mask image that is the bitmap.
You cannot draw directly in the iPhone. Every time the user moves a finger, you will have to modify the mask bitmap then invalidate the UIView that draws the image. You may just be able to draw the same image again, or you may need to reconstruct the mask and masked image each time you draw. As long as the mask image refers directly to the bitmap pixel data, very little memory is actually allocated.
So in psuedocode you want something like this:
scratchableImage = ...
width = CGImageGetWidth( scratchableImage );
height = CGImageGetHeight( scratchableImage );
colorspace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceGray();
pixels = CFDataCreateMutable( NULL , width * height );
bitmap = CFBitmapContextCreate( CFDataGetMutableBytePtr( pixels ) , width , height , 8 , width , colorspace , kCGImageAlphaNone );
provider = CGDataProviderCreateWithCFData( pixels );
mask = CGImageMaskCreate( width , height , 8 , 8 , width , provider , NULL , false , kCGRenderingIntentDefault );
scratched = CGImageCreateWithImageInRect( scratchableImage , mask );
At this point, scratched will have an alpha channel dictated by bitmap but bitmap has garbage data. White pixels in bitmap are opaque, and black pixels are clear. Paint all white pixels in bitmap then, as the user scratches, paint black pixels. I think that changes to bitmap will automatically apply every time scratched is drawn, but if not then just recreate mask and scratched every time you draw.
You probably have a custom UIView for tracking user input. You could derive your custom view from UIImageView and let it draw the image or do the following:
-(void) drawRect:(CGRect)inDirty {
// assume scratched is a member
CGContextDrawImage( UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext() , [self bounds] , scratched );
}
Alternately you can skip creating scratched and instead use CGContextClipToMask and draw the original scratchableImage directly. If there is no scratchableImage and your scratch area is a texture or view hierarchy, take this approach.

Related

Resize an image for Histogram of Gradient

I have an image in size of 150 pixel in height and 188 pixel in width. I'm going to calculate HOG on this image. As this descriptor needs the size of detector window(image) to be 64x128, Should I resize my image to 64x128 and then use this descriptor? like this :
Image<Gray, Byte> GrayFrame = new Image<Gray, Byte>(_TrainImg.Size);
GrayFrame = GrayFrame.Resize(64, 128, INTER.CV_INTER_LINEAR);
I concern resizing may change the original gradients orientation depending on how it is resized since we are ignoring the aspect ratio of the image?
By the way, The image is croped and I can't crop it anymore. It means this is the size of image after cropping and this is my final bounding box.
Unfortunately the openCV HoGDescriptor documentation is missing.
In openCV you can change the values for detection window, cell size, blockStride and block size.
cv::HOGDescriptor hogDesc;
hogDesc.blockSize = cv::Size(2*binSize, 2*binSize);
hogDesc.blockStride = cv::Size(binSize, binSize);
hogDesc.cellSize = cv::Size(binSize, binSize);
hogDesc.winSize = cv::Size(imgWidth, imgHeight);
Then extract features using
std::vector<float> descriptors;
std::vector<cv::Point> locations;
hogDesc.compute(img, descriptors, cv::Size(0,0), cv::Size(0,0), locations);
Note:
I guess, that the winSize has to be divisible by the blockSize and the blockSize by the cellSize.
The size of the features is dependent on all these variables, so ensure to use images of same size and do not change the settings to not run into trouble.

Copying a portion of an IplImage into another Iplimage (that is of same size is the source)

I have a set of mask images that I need to use everytime I recognise a previously-known scene on my camera. All the mask images are in IplImage format. There will be instances where, for example, the camera has panned to a slightly different but nearby location. this means that if I do a template matching somewhere in the middle of the current scene, I will be able to recognise the scene with some amount of shift of the template in this scene. All I need to do is use those shifts to adjust the mask image ROIs so that they can be overlayed appropriately based on the template-matching. I know that there are functions such as:
cvSetImageROI(Iplimage* img, CvRect roi)
cvResetImageROI(IplImage* img);
Which I can use to set crop/uncrop my image. However, it didn't work for me quit the way I expected. I would really appreciate if someone could suggest an alternative or what I am doing wrong, or even what I haven't thought of!
**I must also point out that I need to keep the image size same at all times. The only thing that will be different is the actual area of interest in the image. I can probably use the zero/one padding to cover the unused areas.
I believe a solution without making too many copies of the original image would be:
// Make a new IplImage
IplImage* img_src_cpy = cvCreateImage(cvGetSize(img_src), img_src->depth, img_src->nChannels);
// Crop Original Image without changing the ROI
for(int rows = roi.y; rows < roi.height; rows++) {
for(int cols = roi.x; rows < roi.width; cols++) {
img_src_cpy->imageData[(rows-roi.y)*img_src_cpy->widthStep + (cols-roi.x)] = img_src[rows*img_src + cols];
}
{
//Now copy everything to the original image OR simply return the new image if calling from a function
cvCopy(img_src_cpy, img_src); // OR return img_src_cpy;
I tried the code out on itself and it is also fast enough for me (executes in about 1 ms for 332 x 332 Greyscale image)

Trim alpha from CGImage

I need to get a trimmed CGImage. I have an image which has empty space (alpha = 0) around some colors and need to trim it to get the size of only the visible colors.
Thanks.
There's three ways of doing this :
1) Use photoshop (or image editor of choice) to edit the image - I assume you can't do this, it's too obvious an answer!
2) Ignore it - why not just ignore it, draw the image it's full size? It's transparent so the user will never notice.
3) Write some code that goes through each pixel in the image until it gets to one that has an alpha value > 0. This should give you the number of rows to trim from the top. However, this will slow down your UI so you might want to do it on a background thread.
e.g.
// To get the number of transparent rows at the top of the image
// Sorry this code is so ugly
uint32 *p = start_of_image;
while ( 0 == *p & 0x000000ff && p < end_of_image_data) ++p;
uint number_of_white_rows_at_top = (p - start_of_image) / width_of_image;
When you know the amount of transparent space from around the image you can draw it using a UIImageView, set the renderMode to center and let it do the trimming for you :)

AVFoundation buffer comparison to a saved image

I am a long time reader, first time poster on StackOverflow, and must say it has been a great source of knowledge for me.
I am trying to get to know the AVFoundation framework.
What I want to do is save what the camera sees and then detect when something changes.
Here is the part where I save the image to a UIImage :
if (shouldSetBackgroundImage) {
CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB();
// Create a bitmap graphics context with the sample buffer data
CGContextRef context = CGBitmapContextCreate(rowBase, bufferWidth,
bufferHeight, 8, bytesPerRow,
colorSpace, kCGBitmapByteOrder32Little | kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst);
// Create a Quartz image from the pixel data in the bitmap graphics context
CGImageRef quartzImage = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(context);
// Free up the context and color space
CGContextRelease(context);
CGColorSpaceRelease(colorSpace);
// Create an image object from the Quartz image
UIImage * image = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:quartzImage];
[self setBackgroundImage:image];
NSLog(#"reference image actually set");
// Release the Quartz image
CGImageRelease(quartzImage);
//Signal that the image has been saved
shouldSetBackgroundImage = NO;
}
and here is the part where I check if there is any change in the image seen by the camera :
else {
CGImageRef cgImage = [backgroundImage CGImage];
CGDataProviderRef provider = CGImageGetDataProvider(cgImage);
CFDataRef bitmapData = CGDataProviderCopyData(provider);
char* data = CFDataGetBytePtr(bitmapData);
if (data != NULL)
{
int64_t numDiffer = 0, pixelCount = 0;
NSMutableArray * pointsMutable = [NSMutableArray array];
for( int row = 0; row < bufferHeight; row += 8 ) {
for( int column = 0; column < bufferWidth; column += 8 ) {
//we get one pixel from each source (buffer and saved image)
unsigned char *pixel = rowBase + (row * bytesPerRow) + (column * BYTES_PER_PIXEL);
unsigned char *referencePixel = data + (row * bytesPerRow) + (column * BYTES_PER_PIXEL);
pixelCount++;
if ( !match(pixel, referencePixel, matchThreshold) ) {
numDiffer++;
[pointsMutable addObject:[NSValue valueWithCGPoint:CGPointMake(SCREEN_WIDTH - (column/ (float) bufferHeight)* SCREEN_WIDTH - 4.0, (row/ (float) bufferWidth)* SCREEN_HEIGHT- 4.0)]];
}
}
}
numberOfPixelsThatDiffer = numDiffer;
points = [pointsMutable copy];
}
For some reason, this doesn't work, meaning that the iPhone detects almost everything as being different from the saved image, even though I set a very low threshold for detection in the match function...
Do you have any idea of what I am doing wrong?
There are three possibilities I can think of for why you might be seeing nearly every pixel be different: colorspace conversions, incorrect mapping of pixel locations, or your thresholding being too sensitive for the actual movement of the iPhone camera. The first two aren't very likely, so I think it might be the third, but they're worth checking.
There might be some color correction going on when you place your pixels within a UIImage, then extract them later. You could try simply storing them in their native state from the buffer, then using that original buffer as the point of comparison, not the UIImage's backing data.
Also, check to make sure that your row / column arithmetic works out for the actual pixel locations in both images. Perhaps generate a difference image the absolute difference of subtracting the two images, then use a simple black / white divided area as a test image for the camera.
The most likely case is that the overall image is shifting by more than one pixel simply through the act of a human hand holding it. These whole-frame image shifts could cause almost every pixel to be different in a simple comparison. You may need to adjust your thresholding or do more intelligent motion estimation, like is used in video compression routines.
Finally, when it comes to the comparison operation, I'd recommend taking a look at OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders for performing this. You should see a huge speedup (14-28X in my benchmarks) over doing this pixel-by-pixel comparison on the CPU. I show how to do color-based thresholding using the GPU in this article, which has this iPhone sample application that tracks colored objects in real time using GLSL shaders.
Human eyes are way much different than a camera (even a very expensive one) in the way that we don't perceive minimal light changes or small motion changes. Cameras DO, they are very sensitive but not smart at all!
With your current approach (it seems you are comparing each pixel):
What would happen if the frame is shifted only 1 pixel to the right?! You can image right the result of your algorithm, right?. Humans will perceive nothing or almost nothing.
There is also the camera shutter problem: That means that every frame might not have the same amount of light. Hence, a pixel-by-pixel comparison method is too prone to fail.
You want to at least pre-process your image and extract some basic features. Maybe edges, corners, etc. OpenCV is easy for that but I am not sure that doing such a processing will be fast in the iPhone. (It depends on your image size)
Alternatively you can try the naive template matching algorithm with a template size that will be a little short than your hole view size.
Image Processing is computationally expensive so don't expect it to be fast from the first time, specially in a mobile device and even more if you don't have experience in Image Processing/Computer Vision stuff.
Hope it helps ;)

Drawing single pixel in Quartz

I have an array of CGPoints, and I'd like to fill the whole screen with colours, the colour of each pixel depending on the total distance to each of the points in the array. The natural way to do this is to, for each pixel, compute the total distance, and turn that into a colour. Questions follow:
1) How can I colour a single pixel in Quartz? I've been thinking of making 1 by 1 rectangles.
2) Are there better, more efficient ways to achieve this effect?
You don't need to draw it pixel by pixel. You can use radial gradients:
CGPoint points[count];
/* set the points */
CGContextSaveGState(context);
CGContextBeginTransparencyLayer(context, NULL);
CGContextSetAlpha(context, 0.5);
CGContextSetBlendMode(context, kCGBlendModeXOR);
CGContextClipToRect(context, myFrame);
CGFloat radius = myFrame.size.height+myFrame.size.width;
CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace;
CFArrayRef colors;
const CGFloat * locations;
/* create the colors for the gradient */
for(NSUInteger i = 0;i<count;i++){
CGGradientRef gradient = CGGradientCreateWithColors(CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceGray(), colors, locations);
CGContextDrawRadialGradient(context, gradient, points[i], 0.0, points[i], radius, 0);
}
CGContextSetAlpha(context, 1.0);
CGContextEndTransparencyLayer(context);
CGContextRestoreGState(context);
Most of the code is clear, but here are some points:
kCGBlendMode basically adds the value of back- and foreground if both have the same alpha and alpha is not 1.0. You might also be able to use kCGBlendModeColorBurn without the need to play with transparency. Check the reference.
radius is big enough to cover the whole frame. You can set a different value.
Note that locations values should be between 0.0 and 1.0. You need to calibrate your color values depending on the radius.
This has been asked before:
How do I draw a point using Core Graphics?
From Quartz, a 1x1 rectangle would do what you want. But it is certainly not very efficient.
You are better off creating a memory buffer, calculating your point distances, and writing into the array directly within your processing loop. Then to display the result, simply create a CGImage which you can then render into your screen context.