Develop Reference

How to detect edge of object using OpenCV

I am trying to use OpenCV to measure size of filament ( that plastic material used for 3D printing)
What I am trying to do is measuring filament size ( that plastic material used for 3D printing ). The idea is that I use led panel to illuminate filament, then take image with camera, preprocess the image, apply edge detections and calculate it's size. Most filaments are fine made of one colour which is easy to preprocess and get fine results.
The problem comes with transparent filament. I am not able to get useful results. I would like to ask for a little help, or if someone could push me the right directions. I have already tried cropping the image to heigh that is a bit higher than filament, and width just a few pixels and calculating size using number of pixels in those images, but this did not work very well. So now I am here and trying to do it with edge detections
works well for filaments of single colour
not working for transparent filament
Code below is working just fine for common filaments, the problem is when I try to use it for transparent filament. I have tried adjusting tresholds for Canny function. I have tried different colour-spaces. But I am not able to get the results.
Images that may help to understand:
https://imgur.com/gallery/CIv7fxY
image = cv.imread("../images/img_fil_2.PNG") # load image
gray = cv.cvtColor(image, cv.COLOR_BGR2GRAY) # convert image to grayscale
edges = cv.Canny(gray, 100, 200) # detect edges of image

You can use the assumption that the images are taken under the same conditions.
Your main problem is that the reflections in the transparent filament are detected as edges. But, since the image is relatively simple, without any other edges, you can simply take the upper and the lower edge, and measure the distance between them.
A simple way of doing this is to take 2 vertical lines (e.g. image sides), find the edges that intersect the line (basically traverse a column in the image and find edge pixels), and connect the highest and the lowest points to form the edges of the filament. This also removes the curvature in the filament, which I assume is not needed for your application.
You might want to use 3 or 4 vertical lines, for robustness.

Extracting objects with image-difference

Working on object detection in Python with opencv.
I have two pictures
The reference picture with no object in it.
Picture with object.
The result of the images is:
The problem is, the pattern of the reference image is now on my objects. I want to remove this pattern and I don't know how to do it. For further image processing I need the the correct outline of the objects.
Maybe you know how to fix it, or have better ideas to exctract the object.
I would be glad for your help.
Edit: 4. A black object:

As #Mark Setchell commented, the difference of the two images shows which pixels contain the object, you shouldn't try to use it as the output. Instead, find the pixels with a significant difference, and then read those pixels directly from the input image.
Here, I'm using Otsu thresholding to find what "significant difference" is. There are many other ways to do this. I then use the inverse of the mask to blank out pixels in the input image.
import PyDIP as dip
bg = dip.ImageReadTIFF('background.tif')
bg = bg.TensorElement(1) # The image has 3 channels, let's use just the green one
fg = dip.ImageReadTIFF('object.tif')
fg = fg.TensorElement(1)
mask = dip.Abs(bg - fg) # Difference between the two images
mask, t = dip.Threshold(mask, 'otsu') # Find significant differences only
mask = dip.Closing(mask, 7) # Smooth the outline a bit
fg[~mask] = 0 # Blank out pixels not in the mask
I'm using PyDIP above, not OpenCV, because I don't have OpenCV installed. You can easily do the same with OpenCV.
An alternative to smoothing the binary mask as I did there, is to smooth the mask image before thresholding, for example with dip.Gauss(mask,[2]), a Gaussian smoothing.
Edit: The black object.
What happens with this image, is that its illumination has changed significantly, or you have some automatic exposure settings in your camera. Make sure you have turned all of that off so that every image is exposed exactly the same, and that you use the raw images directly off of the camera for this, not images that have gone through some automatic enhancement procedure or even JPEG compression if you can avoid it.
I computed the median of the background image divided by the object image (fg in the code above, but for this new image), which came up to 1.073. That means that the background image is 7% brighter than the object image. I then multiplied fg by this value before computing the absolute difference:
mask = dip.Abs(fg * dip.Median(bg/fg)[0][0] - bg)
This helped a bit, but it showed that the changes in contrast are not consistent across the image.
Next, you can change the threshold selection method. Otsu assumes a bimodal histogram, and works well if you have a significant number of pixels in each group (foreground and background). Here we'll have fewer pixels belonging to the object, because only some of the object pixels have a different color from the background. The 'triangle' method is suitable in this case:
mask, t = dip.Threshold(mask, 'triangle')
This will lead to a mask that contains only some of the object pixels. You'll have to add some additional knowledge about your object (i.e. it is a rotated square) to find the full object. There are also some isolated background pixels that are being picked up by the threshold, those are easy to eliminate using a bit of blurring before the threshold or a small opening after.
Getting the exact outline of the object in this case will be impossible with your current setup. I would suggest you improve your setup by either:
making the background more uniform in illumination,
using color (so that there are fewer possible objects that match the background color so exactly as in this case),
using infrared imaging (maybe the background could have different properties from all the objects to be detected in infrared?),
using back-illumination (this is the best way if your aim is to measure the objects).

OpenCV: How to detect small differences in different images of the same object

I've been trying to detect if a printed image has any defects(shape and color) when compared to either a proof of another printed image which has no defects or the digital version of the image, which also has no defects. I'm using opencv(cv2) and python.
I first take a picture of the printed image. Then, I perform perspective transformation to get the picture of the printed image cropped sufficiently. I am then using Zernike moments, SSIM, and color histograms to compare the color and shape of the image. However, the resulting values vary too much and I am not able to create a threshold for a misprinted image.
I have also tried to subdivide the image into smaller sections and compare those. This is also not creating distinguishable values to determine if there is a misprint or not.
The differences in the print can be subtle or very apparent. Are there any other techniques that I can try? Thanks!
This is an example of a correctly printed image:
This is an example of an incorrectly printed image, it has too much blue ink on the right side:
This is another example of a correct print:
This is an example of a misprint when compared to the one above:

How to remove the shadows from these pictures using python opencv?

How to remove the shadows of the seeds? Also I would like to know if there is a way to change the color of all the seeds to red colour?

It seems rather easy to detect the seeds since your background is homogeneous. You can start by some simple image processing (contrast enhancement, thresholding, contour detection) to detect the seeds and then you can plot red blobs (with the same area as the detected regions) on the original image. As for the shadows, you can check this question (How to remove the shadow in image by using openCV?).

I think you can solve with this paper and it will make you interesting.
The algorithm described there works quite well and this will be a good example for you in using opencv.
And you can find the source code here
Regards.

Detect objects on a white background in Python

I'm trying to use Python to detect how many objects are on a white surface. An example image is found at the end of this post.
I'm wondering how I should do this, mainly because the background is white and most of the time it gets detected as foreground.
What I have now in Python based on this tutorial (http://pythonvision.org/basic-tutorial) uses several libraries and detects the white as the object so count is 1, the tools get detected as background and thus are ignored:
dna = mahotas.imread('dna.jpeg')
dna = dna.squeeze()
dna = pymorph.to_gray(dna)
print dna.shape
print dna.dtype
print dna.max()
print dna.min()
dnaf = ndimage.gaussian_filter(dna, 8)
T = mahotas.thresholding.otsu(dnaf)
labeled, nr_objects = ndimage.label(dnaf > T)
print nr_objects
pylab.imshow(labeled)
pylab.jet()
pylab.show()
Are there any options for getting the white part as background and the tools as foreground?
Thanks in advance!
Example image:
The segmented image where red is foreground and blue background (the few tools merging is not a problem):

If the shadow is not a problem
You can label the images in mahotas (http://mahotas.readthedocs.org/en/latest/labeled.html) given this binary image. You can also use skimage.morphology (which uses ndlabel as was mentioned in comments). http://scikit-image.org/docs/dev/auto_examples/plot_label.html
These are examples of connect-component algorithms and are standard in any general image processing package. ImageJ also makes this quite simple.
If the shadow is a problem
Otsu thresholding returns a single value: a pixel brightness, and all you're doing is keeping all pixels that are dimmer than this threshold. This method is getting tripped up by your shadows, so you need to try another segmentation algorithm, preferably one that does local segmentation (IE it segments small regions of the image individually.)
Adaptive or local methods don't have this problem and would be really well-suited to your image's shadows:
http://scikit-image.org/docs/dev/auto_examples/plot_threshold_adaptive.html#example-plot-threshold-adaptive-py
In mahotas there should be other segmentation methods but I'm only knowledgeable about scikit-image. If you want a serious overview on segmentation, check out this paper: https://peerj.com/preprints/671/
Full disclosure, it's my paper.