Develop Reference

Image stitching

I've recorded the video while bottle was rotated.Then i got frames from video and cut the central block from all images.
So for all frames I got the following images:
I've tried to stitch them to get panorama, but I got bad results.
I used the following program:
import glob
#rom panorama import Panorama
import sys
import numpy
import imutils
import cv2
def readImages(imageString):
images = []
# Get images from arguments.
for i in range(0, len(imageString)):
img = cv2.imread(imageString[i])
images.append(img)
return images
def findAndDescribeFeatures(image):
# Getting gray image
grayImage = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
# Find and describe the features.
# Fast: sift = cv2.xfeatures2d.SURF_create()
sift = cv2.xfeatures2d.SIFT_create()
# Find interest points.
keypoints = sift.detect(grayImage, None)
# Computing features.
keypoints, features = sift.compute(grayImage, keypoints)
# Converting keypoints to numbers.
keypoints = numpy.float32([kp.pt for kp in keypoints])
return keypoints, features
def matchFeatures(featuresA, featuresB):
# Slow: featureMatcher = cv2.DescriptorMatcher_create("BruteForce")
featureMatcher = cv2.DescriptorMatcher_create("FlannBased")
matches = featureMatcher.knnMatch(featuresA, featuresB, k=2)
return matches
def generateHomography(allMatches, keypointsA, keypointsB, ratio, ransacRep):
if not allMatches:
return None
matches = []
for match in allMatches:
# Lowe's ratio test
if len(match) == 2 and (match[0].distance / match[1].distance) < ratio:
matches.append(match[0])
pointsA = numpy.float32([keypointsA[m.queryIdx] for m in matches])
pointsB = numpy.float32([keypointsB[m.trainIdx] for m in matches])
if len(pointsA) > 4:
H, status = cv2.findHomography(pointsA, pointsB, cv2.RANSAC, ransacRep)
return matches, H, status
else:
return None
paths = glob.glob("C:/Users/andre/Desktop/Panorama-master/frames/*.jpg")
images = readImages(paths[::-1])
while len(images) > 1:
imgR = images.pop()
imgL = images.pop()
interestsR, featuresR = findAndDescribeFeatures(imgR)
interestsL, featuresL = findAndDescribeFeatures(imgL)
try:
try:
allMatches = matchFeatures(featuresR, featuresL)
_, H, _ = generateHomography(allMatches, interestsR, interestsL, 0.75, 4.0)
result = cv2.warpPerspective(imgR, H,
(imgR.shape[1] + imgL.shape[1], imgR.shape[0]))
result[0:imgL.shape[0], 0:imgL.shape[1]] = imgL
images.append(result)
except TypeError:
pass
except cv2.error:
pass
result = imutils.resize(images[0], height=260)
cv2.imshow("Result", result)
cv2.imwrite("Result.jpg", result)
cv2.waitKey(0)
My result was:
May be someone know hot to do it better? I think that using small blocks from frame should remove roundness... But...
Data: https://1drv.ms/f/s!ArcAdXhy6TxPho0FLKxyRCL-808Y9g

I managed to achieve a nice result. I rewrote your code just a little bit, here is the changed part:
def generateTransformation(allMatches, keypointsA, keypointsB, ratio):
if not allMatches:
return None
matches = []
for match in allMatches:
# Lowe's ratio test
if len(match) == 2 and (match[0].distance / match[1].distance) < ratio:
matches.append(match[0])
pointsA = numpy.float32([keypointsA[m.queryIdx] for m in matches])
pointsB = numpy.float32([keypointsB[m.trainIdx] for m in matches])
if len(pointsA) > 2:
transformation = cv2.estimateRigidTransform(pointsA, pointsB, True)
if transformation is None or transformation.shape[1] < 1 or transformation.shape[0] < 1:
return None
return transformation
else:
return None
paths = glob.glob("a*.jpg")
images = readImages(paths[::-1])
result = images[0]
while len(images) > 1:
imgR = images.pop()
imgL = images.pop()
interestsR, featuresR = findAndDescribeFeatures(imgR)
interestsL, featuresL = findAndDescribeFeatures(imgL)
allMatches = matchFeatures(featuresR, featuresL)
transformation = generateTransformation(allMatches, interestsR, interestsL, 0.75)
if transformation is None or transformation[0, 2] < 0:
images.append(imgR)
continue
transformation[0, 0] = 1
transformation[1, 1] = 1
transformation[0, 1] = 0
transformation[1, 0] = 0
transformation[1, 2] = 0
result = cv2.warpAffine(imgR, transformation, (imgR.shape[1] +
int(transformation[0, 2] + 1), imgR.shape[0]))
result[:, :imgL.shape[1]] = imgL
cv2.imshow("R", result)
images.append(result)
cv2.waitKey(1)
cv2.imshow("Result", result)
So the key thing I changed is the transformation of the images. I use estimateRigidTransform() instead of findHomography() to calculate transformation of the image. From that transformation matrix I only extract the x coordinate translation, which is in the [0, 2] cell of the resulting Affine Transformation matrix transformation. I set the other transformation matrix elements as if it is an identity transformation (no scaling, no perspective, no rotation or y translation). Then I pass it to warpAffine() to transform the imgR the same way you did with warpPerspective().
You can do it because you have stable camera and spinning object positions and you capture with a straight front view of the object. It means that you don't have to do any perspective / scaling / rotation image corrections and can just "glue" them together by x axis.
I think your approach fails because you actually observe the bottle with a slightly tilted down camera view or the bottle is not in the middle of the screen. I'll try to describe that with an image. I depict some text on the bottle with red. For example the algorithm finds a matching points pair (green) on the bottom of the captured round object. Note that the point moves not only right, but diagonally up too. The program then calculates the transformation taking into account the points which move up slightly. This continues to get worse frame by frame.
The recognition of matching image points also may be slightly inaccurate, so extracting only the x translation is even better because you give the algorithm "a clue" what actual situation you have. This makes it less applicable for another conditions, but in your case it improves the result a lot.
Also I filter out some incorrect results with if transformation[0, 2] < 0 check (it can rotate only one direction, and the code wont work if that is negative anyways).

OpenCV Python best thresholding for document photos with varying light

Thank you for your time dear reader,
i´m trying to implement a document scanner in Python/OpenCV but im struggling with varying lights in the image.
Im hoping that maybe some kind soul can at least point me in the right direction because I have no concrete clue how I could improve it - if that is possible or known at all.
Im using otsus binarization for thresholding:
https://docs.opencv.org/3.4.0/d7/d4d/tutorial_py_thresholding.html
My results so far are pretty good:
But for difficult lighting with either two bright/dark areas or one bright - one dark area for instance (this is a crass example) it fails:
Playing around with Gimp curves sometimes gets me clear edges - maybe there is a best practice how to tackle this problem that I dont know of?
I played around with the code a lot but got no real progress by combining hierarchy / chain approx / approxpolydp epsilon methods etc.
My current code:
#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
import cv2 as cv
import numpy as np
import sys
# zero at the end reads black white
img = cv.imread(sys.argv[1],0)
blur = cv.GaussianBlur(img,(5,5),0)
# find normalized_histogram, and its cumulative distribution function
hist = cv.calcHist([blur],[0],None,[256],[0,256])
hist_norm = hist.ravel()/hist.max()
Q = hist_norm.cumsum()
bins = np.arange(256)
fn_min = np.inf
thresh = -1
for i in range(1,256):
p1,p2 = np.hsplit(hist_norm,[i]) # probabilities
q1,q2 = Q[i],Q[255]-Q[i] # cum sum of classes
b1,b2 = np.hsplit(bins,[i]) # weights
# finding means and variances
m1,m2 = np.sum(p1*b1)/q1, np.sum(p2*b2)/q2
v1,v2 = np.sum(((b1-m1)**2)*p1)/q1,np.sum(((b2-m2)**2)*p2)/q2
# calculates the minimization function
fn = v1*q1 + v2*q2
if fn < fn_min:
fn_min = fn
thresh = i
# find otsu's threshold value with OpenCV function
ret, otsu = cv.threshold(blur,0,255,cv.THRESH_BINARY+cv.THRESH_OTSU)
cv.imwrite('otsu.jpg',otsu)
_, contours, hierarchy = cv.findContours(otsu, cv.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
def biggestRectangle(contours):
biggest = None
max_area = 0
indexReturn = -1
for index in range(len(contours)):
i = contours[index]
area = cv.contourArea(i)
if area > 100:
peri = cv.arcLength(i,True)
approx = cv.approxPolyDP(i,0.1*peri,True)
if area > max_area: #and len(approx)==4:
biggest = approx
max_area = area
indexReturn = index
return indexReturn
indexReturn = biggestRectangle(contours)
hull = cv.convexHull(contours[indexReturn])
orig = cv.imread(sys.argv[1])
cv.imwrite('hola.jpg',cv.drawContours(orig, [hull], 0, (0,255,0),3))
The biggest rectangle code I copied from here:
How to detect document from a picture in opencv?
All credits to monic! (accepted answer)

I think the best way to achieve this would be to use color Masks but in HSV so that it stays focused on the color and not on the brightness/contrast.
Keep in mind that OpenCV encodes HSV with those ranges:
H: 0 - 180
S: 0 - 255
V: 0 - 255
Here is how I would do it:
# Convert your image to HSV
imgHsv = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2HSV);
# Define lower/upper color
lower = np.array([0, 0, 180])
upper = np.array([180, 20, 255])
# Check the region of the image actually with a color in the range defined below
# inRange returns a matrix in black and white
bw = cv2.inRange(imgHsv, lower, upper)

Merge MSER detected objetcs (OpenCV, Python)

I am working on this image as source:
Applying the next code...
import cv2
import numpy as np
mser = cv2.MSER_create()
img = cv2.imread('C:\\Users\\Link\\Desktop\\test2.png')
gray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
vis = img.copy()
regions, _ = mser.detectRegions(gray)
hulls = [cv2.convexHull(p.reshape(-1, 1, 2)) for p in regions]
cv2.polylines(vis, hulls, 1, (0, 255, 0))
mask = np.zeros((img.shape[0], img.shape[1], 1), dtype=np.uint8)
for contour in hulls:
cv2.drawContours(mask, [contour], -1, (255, 255, 255), -1)
text_only = cv2.bitwise_and(img, img, mask=mask)
cv2.imshow('img', vis)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.imshow('img', mask)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.imshow('img', text_only)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.imwrite('C:\\Users\\Link\\Desktop\\test_o\\1.png', text_only)
...I am obtaining this as result (mask):
The question is this:
how to merge into a single object the number 5 in the number series (157661546) as long as it is divided in the mask image ?
Thanks

Have a look here, it seems like the exact answer.
Here instead there is my version of the above code fine tuned for text extraction (with masking too).
Below there is the original code from the previous article, "ported" to python 3, opencv 3, added mser and bounding boxes. The main difference with my version is how the grouping distance is defined: mine is text-oriented while the one below is a free geometrical distance.
import sys
import cv2
import numpy as np
def find_if_close(cnt1,cnt2):
row1,row2 = cnt1.shape[0],cnt2.shape[0]
for i in range(row1):
for j in range(row2):
dist = np.linalg.norm(cnt1[i]-cnt2[j])
if abs(dist) < 25: # <-- threshold
return True
elif i==row1-1 and j==row2-1:
return False
img = cv2.imread(sys.argv[1])
gray = cv2.cvtColor(img,cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
cv2.imshow('input', img)
ret,thresh = cv2.threshold(gray,127,255,0)
mser=False
if mser:
mser = cv2.MSER_create()
regions = mser.detectRegions(thresh)
hulls = [cv2.convexHull(p.reshape(-1, 1, 2)) for p in regions[0]]
contours = hulls
else:
thresh = cv2.bitwise_not(thresh) # wants black bg
im2,contours,hier = cv2.findContours(thresh,cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL,2)
cv2.drawContours(img, contours, -1, (0,0,255), 1)
cv2.imshow('base contours', img)
LENGTH = len(contours)
status = np.zeros((LENGTH,1))
print("Elements:", len(contours))
for i,cnt1 in enumerate(contours):
x = i
if i != LENGTH-1:
for j,cnt2 in enumerate(contours[i+1:]):
x = x+1
dist = find_if_close(cnt1,cnt2)
if dist == True:
val = min(status[i],status[x])
status[x] = status[i] = val
else:
if status[x]==status[i]:
status[x] = i+1
unified = []
maximum = int(status.max())+1
for i in range(maximum):
pos = np.where(status==i)[0]
if pos.size != 0:
cont = np.vstack(contours[i] for i in pos)
hull = cv2.convexHull(cont)
unified.append(hull)
cv2.drawContours(img,contours,-1,(0,0,255),1)
cv2.drawContours(img,unified,-1,(0,255,0),2)
#cv2.drawContours(thresh,unified,-1,255,-1)
for c in unified:
(x,y,w,h) = cv2.boundingRect(c)
cv2.rectangle(img, (x,y), (x+w,y+h), (255, 0, 0), 2)
cv2.imshow('result', img)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()
Sample output (the yellow blob is below the binary threshold conversion so it's ignored). Red: original contours, green: unified ones, blue: bounding boxes.
Probably there is no need to use MSER as a simple findContours may work fine.
------------------------
Starting from here there is my old answer, before I found the above code. I'm leaving it anyway as it describe a couple of different approaches that may be easier/more appropriate for some scenarios.
A quick and dirty trick is to add a small gaussian blur and a high threshold before the MSER (or some dilute/erode if you prefer fancy things). In practice you just make the text bolder so that it fills small gaps. Obviously you can later discard this version and crop from the original one.
Otherwise, if your text is in lines, you may try to detect the average line center (make an histogram of Y coordinates and find the peaks for example). Then, for each line, look for fragments with a close average X. Quite fragile if text is noisy/complex.
If you do not need to split each letter, getting the bounding box for the whole word, may be easier: just split in groups based on a maximum horizontal distance between fragments (using the leftmost/rightmost points of the contour). Then use the leftmost and rightmost boxes within each group to find the whole bounding box. For multiline text first group by centroids Y coordinate.
Implementation notes:
Opencv allows you to create histograms but you probably can get away with something like this (worked for me on a similar task):
def histogram(vals, th=4, bins=400):
hist = np.zeros(bins)
for y_center in vals:
bucket = int(round(y_center / 2.)) <-- change this "2."
hist[bucket-1] += 1
print("hist: ", hist)
hist = np.where(hist > th, hist, 0)
return hist
Here my histogram is just an array with 400 buckets (my image was 800px high so each bucket catches two pixels, that is where the "2." comes from). Vals are the Y coordinates of the centroids of each fragment (you may want to ignore very small elements when you build this list). The th threshold is there just to remove some noise. You should get something like this:
0,0,0,5,22,0,0,0,0,43,7,0,0,0
This list describes, moving top to bottom, how many fragments are at each location.
Now I ran another pass to merge the peaks into a single value (just scan the array and sum while it is non-zero and reset the count on first zero) getting something like this {y:count}:
{9:27, 20:50}
Now I know I have two text rows at y=9 and y=20. Now, or before, you assign each fragment to on line (with again an 8px threshold in my case). Now you can process each line on its own, finding "words". BTW, I have your identical problem with broken letters that's why I came here looking for MSER :). Notice that if you find the whole bounding box for the word this problem happens only on the first/last letters: the other broken letters just falls inside the word box anyway.
Here is a reference for the erode/dilate thing, but gaussian blur/th worked for me.
UPDATE: I've noticed that there is something wrong in this line:
regions = mser.detectRegions(thresh)
I pass in the already thresholded image(!?). This is not relevant for the aggregation part but keep in mind that the mser part is not being used as expected.

Detect the green lines in this image and calculate their lengths

Sample Images
The image can be more noisy at times where more objects intervene from the background. Right now I am using various techniques using the RGB colour space to detect the lines but it fails when there is change in the colour due to intervening obstacles from the background. I am using opencv and python.
I have read that HSV is better for colour detection and used but haven't been successful yet.
I am not able to find a generic solution to this problem. Any hints or clues in this direction would be of great help.

STILL IN PROGRESS
First of all, an RGB image consists of 3 grayscale images. Since you need the green color you will deal only with one channel. The green one. To do so, you can split the image, you can use b,g,r = cv2.split('Your Image'). You will get an output like that if you are showing the green channel:
After that you should threshold the image using your desired way. I prefer Otsu's thresholding in this case. The output after thresholding is:
It's obvious that the thresholded image is extremley noisy. So performing erosion will reduce the noise a little bit. The noise reduced image will be similar to the following:
I tried using closing instead of dilation, but closing preserves some unwanted noise. So I separately performed erosion followed by dilation. After dilation the output is:
Note that: You can do your own way in morphological operation. You can use opening instead of what I did. The results are subjective from
one person to another.
Now you can try one these two methods:
1. Blob Detection.
2. HoughLine Transform.
TODO
Try out these two methods and choose the best.

You should use the fact that you know you are trying to detect a line by using the line hough transform.
http://docs.opencv.org/2.4/doc/tutorials/imgproc/imgtrans/hough_lines/hough_lines.html
When the obstacle also look like a line use the fact that you know approximately what is the orientation of the green lines.
If you don't know the orientation of the line use hte fact that there are several green lines with the same orientation and only one line that is the obstacle
Here is a code for what i meant:
import cv2
import numpy as np
# Params
minLineCount = 300 # min number of point alogn line with the a specif orientation
minArea = 100
# Read img
img = cv2.imread('i.png')
greenChannel = img[:,:,1]
# Do noise reduction
iFilter = cv2.bilateralFilter(greenChannel,5,5,5)
# Threshold data
#ret,iThresh = cv2.threshold(iFilter,0,255,cv2.THRESH_BINARY+cv2.THRESH_OTSU)
iThresh = (greenChannel > 4).astype(np.uint8)*255
# Remove small areas
se1 = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (5,5))
iThreshRemove = cv2.morphologyEx(iThresh, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, se1)
# Find edges
iEdge = cv2.Canny(iThreshRemove,50,100)
# Hough line transform
lines = cv2.HoughLines(iEdge, 1, 3.14/180,75)
# Find the theta with the most lines
thetaCounter = dict()
for line in lines:
theta = line[0, 1]
if theta in thetaCounter:
thetaCounter[theta] += 1
else:
thetaCounter[theta] = 1
maxThetaCount = 0
maxTheta = 0
for theta in thetaCounter:
if thetaCounter[theta] > maxThetaCount:
maxThetaCount = thetaCounter[theta]
maxTheta = theta
# Find the rhos that corresponds to max theta
rhoValues = []
for line in lines:
rho = line[0, 0]
theta = line[0, 1]
if theta == maxTheta:
rhoValues.append(rho)
# Go over all the lines with the specific orientation and count the number of pixels on that line
# if the number is bigger than minLineCount draw the pixels in finaImage
lineImage = np.zeros_like(iThresh, np.uint8)
for rho in range(min(rhoValues), max(rhoValues), 1):
a = np.cos(maxTheta)
b = np.sin(maxTheta)
x0 = round(a*rho)
y0 = round(b*rho)
lineCount = 0
pixelList = []
for jump in range(-1000, 1000, 1):
x1 = int(x0 + jump * (-b))
y1 = int(y0 + jump * (a))
if x1 < 0 or y1 < 0 or x1 >= lineImage.shape[1] or y1 >= lineImage.shape[0]:
continue
if iThreshRemove[y1, x1] == int(255):
pixelList.append((y1, x1))
lineCount += 1
if lineCount > minLineCount:
for y,x in pixelList:
lineImage[y, x] = int(255)
# Remove small areas
## Opencv 2.4
im2, contours, hierarchy = cv2.findContours(lineImage,cv2.RETR_CCOMP,cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE )
finalImage = np.zeros_like(lineImage)
finalShapes = []
for contour in contours:
if contour.size > minArea:
finalShapes.append(contour)
cv2.fillPoly(finalImage, finalShapes, 255)
## Opencv 3.0
# output = cv2.connectedComponentsWithStats(lineImage, 8, cv2.CV_32S)
#
# finalImage = np.zeros_like(output[1])
# finalImage = output[1]
# stat = output[2]
# for label in range(output[0]):
# if label == 0:
# continue
# cc = stat[label,:]
# if cc[cv2.CC_STAT_AREA] < minArea:
# finalImage[finalImage == label] = 0
# else:
# finalImage[finalImage == label] = 255
# Show image
#cv2.imwrite('finalImage2.jpg',finalImage)
cv2.imshow('a', finalImage.astype(np.uint8))
cv2.waitKey(0)
and the result for the images:

Copy a part of an image in opencv and python

I'm trying to split an image into several sub-images with opencv by identifying templates of the original image and then copy the regions where I matched those templates. I'm a TOTAL newbie to opencv! I've identified the sub-images using:
result = cv2.matchTemplate(img, template, cv2.TM_CCORR_NORMED)
After some cleanup I get a list of tuples called points in which I iterate to show the rectangles. tw and th is the template width and height respectively.
for pt in points:
re = cv2.rectangle(img, pt, (pt[0] + tw, pt[1] + th), 0, 2)
print('%s, %s' % (str(pt[0]), str(pt[1])))
count+=1
What I would like to accomplish is to save the octagons (https://dl.dropbox.com/u/239592/region01.png) into separated files.
How can I do this? I've read something about contours but I'm not sure how to use it. Ideally I would like to contour the octagon.
Thanks a lot for your help!

If template matching is working for you, stick to it. For instance, I considered the following template:
Then, we can pre-process the input in order to make it a binary one and discard small components. After this step, the template matching is performed. Then it is a matter of filtering the matches by means of discarding close ones (I've used a dummy method for that, so if there are too many matches you could see it taking some time). After we decide which points are far apart (and thus identify different hexagons), we can do minor adjusts to them in the following manner:
Sort by y-coordinate;
If two adjacent items start at a y-coordinate that is too close, then set them both to the same y-coord.
Now you can sort this point list in an appropriate order such that the crops are done in raster order. The cropping part is easily achieved using slicing provided by numpy.
import sys
import cv2
import numpy
outbasename = 'hexagon_%02d.png'
img = cv2.imread(sys.argv[1])
template = cv2.cvtColor(cv2.imread(sys.argv[2]), cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
theight, twidth = template.shape[:2]
# Binarize the input based on the saturation and value.
hsv = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2HSV)
saturation = hsv[:,:,1]
value = hsv[:,:,2]
value[saturation > 35] = 255
value = cv2.threshold(value, 0, 255, cv2.THRESH_OTSU)[1]
# Pad the image.
value = cv2.copyMakeBorder(255 - value, 3, 3, 3, 3, cv2.BORDER_CONSTANT, value=0)
# Discard small components.
img_clean = numpy.zeros(value.shape, dtype=numpy.uint8)
contours, _ = cv2.findContours(value, cv2.RETR_LIST, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
for i, c in enumerate(contours):
area = cv2.contourArea(c)
if area > 500:
cv2.drawContours(img_clean, contours, i, 255, 2)
def closest_pt(a, pt):
if not len(a):
return (float('inf'), float('inf'))
d = a - pt
return a[numpy.argmin((d * d).sum(1))]
match = cv2.matchTemplate(img_clean, template, cv2.TM_CCORR_NORMED)
# Filter matches.
threshold = 0.8
dist_threshold = twidth / 1.5
loc = numpy.where(match > threshold)
ptlist = numpy.zeros((len(loc[0]), 2), dtype=int)
count = 0
print "%d matches" % len(loc[0])
for pt in zip(*loc[::-1]):
cpt = closest_pt(ptlist[:count], pt)
dist = ((cpt[0] - pt[0]) ** 2 + (cpt[1] - pt[1]) ** 2) ** 0.5
if dist > dist_threshold:
ptlist[count] = pt
count += 1
# Adjust points (could do for the x coords too).
ptlist = ptlist[:count]
view = ptlist.ravel().view([('x', int), ('y', int)])
view.sort(order=['y', 'x'])
for i in xrange(1, ptlist.shape[0]):
prev, curr = ptlist[i - 1], ptlist[i]
if abs(curr[1] - prev[1]) < 5:
y = min(curr[1], prev[1])
curr[1], prev[1] = y, y
# Crop in raster order.
view.sort(order=['y', 'x'])
for i, pt in enumerate(ptlist, start=1):
cv2.imwrite(outbasename % i,
img[pt[1]-2:pt[1]+theight-2, pt[0]-2:pt[0]+twidth-2])
print 'Wrote %s' % (outbasename % i)
If you want only the contours of the hexagons, then crop on img_clean instead of img (but then it is pointless to sort the hexagons in raster order).
Here is a representation of the different regions that would be cut for your two examples without modifying the code above:

I am sorry, I didn't understand from your question on how do you relate matchTemplate and Contours.
Anyway, below is a small technique using contours. It is on the assumption that your other images are also like the one you provided. I am not sure if it works with your other images. But I think it would help to get a startup. Try this yourself and make necessary adjustments and modifications.
What I did :
1 - I needed the edge of octagons . So Thresholded Image using Otsu and apply dilation and erosion (or use any method you like that works well for all your images, beware of the edges in left edge of image).
2 - Then found contours (More about contours : http://goo.gl/r0ID0
3 - For each contours, find its convex hull, find its area(A) & perimeter(P)
4 - For a perfect octagon, P*P/A = 13.25 approximately. I used it here and cut it and saved it.
5 - You can see cropping it also removes some edges of octagon. If you want it, adjust the cropping dimension.
Code :
import cv2
import numpy as np
img = cv2.imread('region01.png')
gray = cv2.cvtColor(img,cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
ret,thresh = cv2.threshold(gray,0,255,cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV+cv2.THRESH_OTSU)
thresh = cv2.dilate(thresh,None,iterations = 2)
thresh = cv2.erode(thresh,None)
contours,hierarchy = cv2.findContours(thresh,cv2.RETR_LIST,cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
number = 0
for cnt in contours:
hull = cv2.convexHull(cnt)
area = cv2.contourArea(hull)
P = cv2.arcLength(hull,True)
if ((area != 0) and (13<= P**2/area <= 14)):
#cv2.drawContours(img,[hull],0,255,3)
x,y,w,h = cv2.boundingRect(hull)
number = number + 1
roi = img[y:y+h,x:x+w]
cv2.imshow(str(number),roi)
cv2.imwrite("1"+str(number)+".jpg",roi)
cv2.imshow('img',img)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()
Those 6 octagons will be stored as separate files.
Hope it helps !!!