I am trying to extract the account number from an image of a cheque. The logic that I have is that, I am trying to find the rectangle that contains the account number, slice the bounding rectangle and then feed the slice into an OCR to get the text out of it.
The problem I am facing is when the rectangle is not very prominent and light colour, I am not able to get the rectangle contour since the edges are not connected totally.
How to overcome this?
Things I tried, but did not work are
I cannot increase the erosion iteration, to erode it more, because then the edges connect with the surrounding black pixels and form a different shape.
Reducing the threshold offset might help, but, it seems inefficient. Since the code has to work with several types of images. I can start with offset 10 and keep incrementing the offset and checking if I found the rectangle or not. This will increase the time a lot for cheques with prominent rectangles that work well at offset 20 or more. And since I don't have a condition to check if the edges of the rectangle are prominent or not, the loop has to be applied in all the cheques.
Keeping the above points in mind. Can someone help me out with a solution to this problem?
Libraries used and versions
scikit-image==0.13.1
opencv-python==3.3.0.10
Code
from skimage.filters import threshold_adaptive, threshold_local
import cv2
Step 1:
image = cv2.imread('cropped.png')
Step 2:
Using adaptive threshold from skimage to remove the background, so that I can get the account number rectangle box. This works fine for the cheques where the rectangle is more pronounced, but when the rectangle edges are thin, or are lighter in colour, the threshold results in
unconnected edges, because of which I am not able to find the contours. I have attached examples of this further down in the question.
account_number_block = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_RGB2GRAY)
account_number_block = threshold_adaptive(account_number_block, 251, offset=20)
account_number_block = account_number_block.astype("uint8") * 255
Step 3:
Erode the image a bit to try to connect small disconnections in the edges
kernel = np.ones((3,3), np.uint8)
account_number_block = cv2.erode(account_number_block, kernel, iterations=5)
Find the contours
(_, cnts, _) = cv2.findContours(account_number_block.copy(), cv2.RETR_LIST, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
# cnts = sorted(cnts, key=cv2.contourArea)[:3]
rect_cnts = [] # Rectangular contours
for cnt in cnts:
approx = cv2.approxPolyDP(cnt,0.01*cv2.arcLength(cnt,True),True)
if len(approx) == 4:
rect_cnts.append(cnt)
rect_cnts = sorted(rect_cnts, key=cv2.contourArea, reverse=True)[:1]
Working Example
Step 1: Original Image
Step 2: After thresholding to remove the background.
Step 3: Finding contours to find rectangle box of the account number.
Failure Working example - Light rectangular boundary.
Step 1: Read original image
Step 2: After thresholding to remove the background. Notice that the edges of the rectangle are not connected, because of which I am not able to get the contour out of it.
Step 3: Finding contours to find rectangle box of the account number.
import numpy as np
import cv2
import pytesseract as pt
from PIL import Image
#Run Main
if __name__ == "__main__" :
image = cv2.imread("image.jpg", -1)
# resize image to speed up computation
rows,cols,_ = image.shape
image = cv2.resize(image, (np.int32(cols/2),np.int32(rows/2)))
# convert to gray and binarize
gray_img = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
binary_img = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(gray_img, 255, cv2.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_MEAN_C, cv2.THRESH_BINARY, 9, 9)
# note: erosion and dilation works on white forground
binary_img = cv2.bitwise_not(binary_img)
# dilate the image to fill the gaps
kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (3,3))
dilated_img = cv2.morphologyEx(binary_img, cv2.MORPH_DILATE, kernel,iterations=2)
# find contours, discard contours which do not belong to a rectangle
(_, cnts, _) = cv2.findContours(dilated_img, cv2.RETR_LIST, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
rect_cnts = [] # Rectangular contours
for cnt in cnts:
approx = cv2.approxPolyDP(cnt,0.01*cv2.arcLength(cnt,True),True)
if len(approx) == 4:
rect_cnts.append(cnt)
# sort contours based on area
rect_cnts = sorted(rect_cnts, key=cv2.contourArea, reverse=True)[:1]
# find bounding rectangle of biggest contour
box = cv2.boundingRect(rect_cnts[0])
x,y,w,h = box[:]
# extract rectangle from the original image
newimg = image[y:y+h,x:x+w]
# use 'pytesseract' to get the text in the new image
text = pt.image_to_string(Image.fromarray(newimg))
print(text)
cv2.namedWindow('Image', cv2.WINDOW_NORMAL)
cv2.imshow('Image', newimg)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()
result: 03541140011724
result: 34785736216
Related
Opencv vers: 4.5
I'm trying to re-create the dimensions of an object by setting it up on a grid and taking as close to a top-down photo I can which I will then get the contours of the largest bounding rectangle and then perspective warp.
I'm currently unable to get the contour for a large bounding square however, it continually only finds smaller rectangles/squares which I'm assuming would not be large enough to properly fix the perspective.
First image: Original
Second image: What I get with my code using openCV
Third image: Close to what I'd ideally get
My code:
import imutils
import numpy as np
import cv2 as cv
# load the query image
image = cv.imread("path/to/image")
# make image greyscale, blur, find edges
grayscale_image = cv.cvtColor(image, cv.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
thresh = cv.adaptiveThreshold(grayscale_image, 255, cv.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_GAUSSIAN_C,
cv.THRESH_BINARY, 11, 2)
# find contours in the threshed image, keep only the largest
# ones
cnts = cv.findContours(
thresh.copy(), cv.RETR_LIST, cv.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
cnts = imutils.grab_contours(cnts)
cnts = sorted(cnts, key=cv.contourArea, reverse=True)[:5]
# draw contours for reference
cv.drawContours(image, cnts, -1, (0, 255, 0), 3)
Instead of adaptive thresholding for pre-processing I've tried using bilateral filter or gaussian blur into canny edge detection but the outcome still doesn't find large rectangles.
Any help would be greatly appreciated as I'm at a loss on why it can't detect larger squares. Also, if people think there's a better method for fixing the perspective so that I can accurately recreate the board dimensions please let me know.
You may apply the following stages:
Apply threshold using cv2.threshold (instead of cv2.adaptiveThreshold).
Apply opening with long column vector for keeping only the vertical lines.
Find contours in vert_lines.
Sort contours left to right.
Draw most left and most right contours on a sketch (black) image.
Apply opening with long row vector for keeping only the horizontal lines, find contours, sort top to bottom, and draw top and bottom contours.
Find inner contours in the sketch image (with the left, right, top and bottom lines).
The inner contour is the smallest one.
Here is a code sample:
import imutils
import numpy as np
import cv2
# load the query image
image = cv2.imread("image.png")
# make image greyscale, blur, find edges
grayscale_image = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
#thresh = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(grayscale_image, 255, cv2.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_GAUSSIAN_C, cv2.THRESH_BINARY, 11, 2)
thresh = cv2.threshold(grayscale_image, 0, 255, cv2.THRESH_OTSU)[1] # Apply automatic threshold (use THRESH_OTSU).
rect_im = np.zeros_like(thresh) # Sketch image
# Apply opening with long column vector for keeping only the vertical lines.
vert_lines = cv2.morphologyEx(thresh, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, np.ones(50))
# Apply opening with long row vector for keeping only the horizontal lines.
horz_lines = cv2.morphologyEx(thresh, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, np.ones((1,50)))
# Find contours in vert_lines
cnts = imutils.grab_contours(cv2.findContours(vert_lines, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE))
# Sort contours left to right.
cnts = sorted(cnts, key=lambda c: cv2.boundingRect(c)[0]) # cv2.boundingRect(c)[0] is the left side x coordinate.
cv2.drawContours(rect_im, [cnts[0], cnts[-1]], -1, 255, -1) # Draw left and right contours
# Find contours in horz_lines
cnts = imutils.grab_contours(cv2.findContours(horz_lines, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE))
# Sort contours top to bottom.
cnts = sorted(cnts, key=lambda c: cv2.boundingRect(c)[1]) # cv2.boundingRect(c)[1] is the top y coordinate.
cv2.drawContours(rect_im, [cnts[0], cnts[-1]], -1, 255, -1) # Draw top and bottom contours
# Find contours in rect_im
cnts = imutils.grab_contours(cv2.findContours(rect_im, cv2.RETR_TREE, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)) # Note: use RETR_TREE for getting inner contour.
c = min(cnts, key=cv2.contourArea) # Get the smallest contour
# Draw contour for reference
cv2.drawContours(image, [c], -1, (0, 255, 0), 3)
Results:
thresh:
vert_lines:
horz_lines:
Left and right lines:
rect_im:
image (output):
given a dental form as input, need to find all the checkboxes present in the form using image processing. I have answered my current approach below. Is there any better approach to find the checkboxes for low-quality docs as well?
sample input:
This is one approach in which we can solve the issue,
import cv2
import numpy as np
image=cv2.imread('path/to/image.jpg')
### binarising image
gray_scale=cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
th1,img_bin = cv2.threshold(gray_scale,150,225,cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
Defining vertical and horizontal kernels
lineWidth = 7
lineMinWidth = 55
kernal1 = np.ones((lineWidth,lineWidth), np.uint8)
kernal1h = np.ones((1,lineWidth), np.uint8)
kernal1v = np.ones((lineWidth,1), np.uint8)
kernal6 = np.ones((lineMinWidth,lineMinWidth), np.uint8)
kernal6h = np.ones((1,lineMinWidth), np.uint8)
kernal6v = np.ones((lineMinWidth,1), np.uint8)
Detect horizontal lines
img_bin_h = cv2.morphologyEx(~img_bin, cv2.MORPH_CLOSE, kernal1h) # bridge small gap in horizonntal lines
img_bin_h = cv2.morphologyEx(img_bin_h, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, kernal6h) # kep ony horiz lines by eroding everything else in hor direction
finding vertical lines
## detect vert lines
img_bin_v = cv2.morphologyEx(~img_bin, cv2.MORPH_CLOSE, kernal1v) # bridge small gap in vert lines
img_bin_v = cv2.morphologyEx(img_bin_v, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, kernal6v)# kep ony vert lines by eroding everything else in vert direction
merging vertical and horizontal lines to get blocks. Adding a layer of dilation to remove small gaps
### function to fix image as binary
def fix(img):
img[img>127]=255
img[img<127]=0
return img
img_bin_final = fix(fix(img_bin_h)|fix(img_bin_v))
finalKernel = np.ones((5,5), np.uint8)
img_bin_final=cv2.dilate(img_bin_final,finalKernel,iterations=1)
Apply Connected component analysis on the binary image to get the blocks required.
ret, labels, stats,centroids = cv2.connectedComponentsWithStats(~img_bin_final, connectivity=8, ltype=cv2.CV_32S)
### skipping first two stats as background
for x,y,w,h,area in stats[2:]:
cv2.rectangle(image,(x,y),(x+w,y+h),(0,255,0),2)
You can also use contours for this problem.
# Reading the image in grayscale and thresholding it
Image = cv2.imread("findBox.jpg", 0)
ret, Thresh = cv2.threshold(Image, 100, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
Now perform dilation and erosion twice to join the dotted lines present inside the boxes.
kernel = np.ones((3, 3), dtype=np.uint8)
Thresh = cv2.dilate(Thresh, kernel, iterations=2)
Thresh = cv2.erode(Thresh, kernel, iterations=2)
Find contours in the image with cv2.RETR_TREE flag to get all contours with parent-child relations. For more info on this.
Contours, Hierarchy = cv2.findContours(Thresh, cv2.RETR_TREE, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE)
Now all the boxes along with all the alphabets in the image are detected. We have to eliminate the alphabets detected, very small contours(due to noise), and also those boxes which contain smaller boxes inside them.
For this, I am running a for loop iterating over all the contours detected, and using this loop I am saving 3 values for each contour in 3 different lists.
1st value: Area of contour(Number of pixels a contour encloses)
2nd value: Contour's bounding rectangle info.
3rd value: Ratio of area of contour to the area of its bounding rectangle.
Areas = []
Rects = []
Ratios = []
for Contour in Contours:
# Getting bounding rectangle
Rect = cv2.boundingRect(Contour)
# Drawing contour on new image and finding number of white pixels for contour area
C_Image = np.zeros(Thresh.shape, dtype=np.uint8)
cv2.drawContours(C_Image, [Contour], -1, 255, -1)
ContourArea = np.sum(C_Image == 255)
# Area of the bounding rectangle
Rect_Area = Rect[2]*Rect[3]
# Calculating ratio as explained above
Ratio = ContourArea / Rect_Area
# Storing data
Areas.append(ContourArea)
Rects.append(Rect)
Ratios.append(Ratio)
Filtering out undesired contours:
Getting indices of those contours which have an area less than 3600(threshold value for this image) and which have Ratio >= 0.99.
The ratio defines the extent of overlap of contour to its bounding rectangle. As in this case, the desired contours are rectangle in shape, this ratio for them is expected to be "1.0" (0.99 for keeping a threshold of small noise).
BoxesIndices = [i for i in range(len(Contours)) if Ratios[i] >= 0.99 and Areas[i] > 3600]
Now final contours are those among contours at indices "BoxesIndices" which do not have a child contour(this will extract innermost contours) and if they have a child contour, then this child contour should not be one of the contours at indices "BoxesIndices".
FinalBoxes = [Rects[i] for i in BoxesIndices if Hierarchy[0][i][2] == -1 or BoxesIndices.count(Hierarchy[0][i][2]) == 0]
Final output image
I'm a beginner in image processing with Python so I need help.
I'm trying to remove areas of connected pixels from my pictures with the code posted below. Actually, it works but not well.
What I desire is the removing of areas of pixels, such as those marked in red in the pictures reported below, from my images, so as to obtain a cleaned picture.
Would be also great to set a minimum and a maximum limit for the dimensions of the detected areas of connected pixels.
Example of a picture with marked areas 1
Example of a picture with marked areas 2
This is my currently code:
### LOAD MODULES ###
import numpy as np
import imutils
import cv2
def is_contour_bad(c): # Decide what I want to find and its features
peri=cv2.contourArea(c, True) # Find areas
approx=cv2.approxPolyDP(c, 0.3*peri, True) # Set areas approximation
return not len(approx)>2 # Threshold to decide if add an area to the mask for its removing (if>2 remove)
### DATA PROCESSING ###
image=cv2.imread("025.jpg") # Load a picture
gray=cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY) # Convert to grayscale
cv2.imshow("Original image", image) # Plot
edged=cv2.Canny(gray, 50, 200, 3) # Edges of areas detection
cnts=cv2.findContours(edged.copy(), cv2.RETR_LIST, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE) # Find contours: a curve joining all the continuous points (along the boundary), having same color or intensity
cnts=imutils.grab_contours(cnts)
mask=np.ones(image.shape[:2], dtype="uint8")*255 # Setup the mask with white background
# Loop over the detected contours
for c in cnts:
# If the contour satisfies "is_contour_bad", draw it on the mask
if is_contour_bad(c):
cv2.drawContours(mask, [c], -1, 0, -1) # (source image, list of contours, with -1 all contours in [c] pass, 0 is the intensity, -1 the thickness)
image_cleaned=cv2.bitwise_and(image, image, mask=mask) # Remove the contours from the original image
cv2.imshow("Adopted mask", mask) # Plot
cv2.imshow("Cleaned image", image_cleaned) # Plot
cv2.imwrite("cleaned_025.jpg", image_cleaned) # Write in a file
You may execute the following processing steps:
Threshold the image to binary image using cv2.threshold.
It's not a must, but in your case it looks like shades of gray are not important.
Use closing morphological operation, for closing small gaps in the binary image.
Use cv2.findContours with cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL parameter, for getting the contours (perimeter) surrounding the white clusters.
Modify the logic of "bad contour", to return true, only if area is large (assuming you only want to clean the large three contour).
Here is the updated code:
### LOAD MODULES ###
import numpy as np
import imutils
import cv2
def is_contour_bad(c): # Decide what I want to find and its features
peri = cv2.contourArea(c) # Find areas
return peri > 50 # Large area is considered "bad"
### DATA PROCESSING ###
image = cv2.imread("025.jpg") # Load a picture
gray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY) # Convert to grayscale
# Convert to binary image (all values above 20 are converted to 1 and below to 0)
ret, thresh_gray = cv2.threshold(gray, 20, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
# Use "close" morphological operation to close the gaps between contours
# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18339988/implementing-imcloseim-se-in-opencv
thresh_gray = cv2.morphologyEx(thresh_gray, cv2.MORPH_CLOSE, cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (5,5)));
#Find contours on thresh_gray, use cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL to get external perimeter
_, cnts, _ = cv2.findContours(thresh_gray, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE) # Find contours: a curve joining all the continuous points (along the boundary), having same color or intensity
image_cleaned = gray
# Loop over the detected contours
for c in cnts:
# If the contour satisfies "is_contour_bad", draw it on the mask
if is_contour_bad(c):
# Draw black contour on gray image, instead of using a mask
cv2.drawContours(image_cleaned, [c], -1, 0, -1)
#cv2.imshow("Adopted mask", mask) # Plot
cv2.imshow("Cleaned image", image_cleaned) # Plot
cv2.imwrite("cleaned_025.jpg", image_cleaned) # Write in a file
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()
Result:
Marking contours found for testing:
for c in cnts:
if is_contour_bad(c):
# Draw green line for marking the contour
cv2.drawContours(image, [c], 0, (0, 255, 0), 1)
Result:
There is still work to be done...
Update
Two iterations approach:
First iteration - remove the large contour.
Second iteration - remove small but bright contours.
Here is the code:
import numpy as np
import imutils
import cv2
def is_contour_bad(c, thrs): # Decide what I want to find and its features
peri = cv2.contourArea(c) # Find areas
return peri > thrs # Large area is considered "bad"
image = cv2.imread("025.jpg") # Load a picture
gray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY) # Convert to grayscale
# First iteration - remove the large contour
###########################################################################
# Convert to binary image (all values above 20 are converted to 1 and below to 0)
ret, thresh_gray = cv2.threshold(gray, 20, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
# Use "close" morphological operation to close the gaps between contours
# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18339988/implementing-imcloseim-se-in-opencv
thresh_gray = cv2.morphologyEx(thresh_gray, cv2.MORPH_CLOSE, cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (5,5)));
#Find contours on thresh_gray, use cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL to get external perimeter
_, cnts, _ = cv2.findContours(thresh_gray, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE) # Find contours: a curve joining all the continuous points (along the boundary), having same color or intensity
image_cleaned = gray
# Loop over the detected contours
for c in cnts:
# If the contour satisfies "is_contour_bad", draw it on the mask
if is_contour_bad(c, 1000):
# Draw black contour on gray image, instead of using a mask
cv2.drawContours(image_cleaned, [c], -1, 0, -1)
###########################################################################
# Second iteration - remove small but bright contours
###########################################################################
# In the second iteration, use high threshold
ret, thresh_gray = cv2.threshold(image_cleaned, 150, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
# Use "dilate" with small radius
thresh_gray = cv2.morphologyEx(thresh_gray, cv2.MORPH_DILATE, cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (2,2)));
#Find contours on thresh_gray, use cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL to get external perimeter
_, cnts, _ = cv2.findContours(thresh_gray, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE) # Find contours: a curve joining all the continuous points (along the boundary), having same color or intensity
# Loop over the detected contours
for c in cnts:
# If the contour satisfies "is_contour_bad", draw it on the mask
# Remove contour if area is above 20 pixels
if is_contour_bad(c, 20):
# Draw black contour on gray image, instead of using a mask
cv2.drawContours(image_cleaned, [c], -1, 0, -1)
###########################################################################
Marked contours:
Using OpenCV (python) I am trying to remove the section of image which is above the border line (white area in this sample image where ORIGINAL is writtn) in the image shown below
Using horizontal and vertical kernels I am able to draw the wireframe, however that does not work many times because many times due to scanning quality few horizontal or vertical lines appear outside the wireframe which causes wrong contour detection. In this image also you can see on top right there is noise which I am detecting as topmost horizontal line.
What I want is, once I get the actual box then I can simply use x, y coordinates for OCR scanning of needed fields (like reference number, Issued In etc).
Following is what I have been able to extract using the code below. However not able to clip the outer extra section of image due to noisy horizontal or vertical lines outside this wireframe. Also tried filling outside section with black and then detecting the contours.
Suggestions please...
kernel_length = np.array(image).shape[1]//40
# A verticle kernel of (1 X kernel_length), which will detect all the verticle lines from the image.
verticle_kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (1, kernel_length))
# A horizontal kernel of (kernel_length X 1), which will help to detect all the horizontal line from the image.
hori_kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (kernel_length, 1))
# A kernel of (3 X 3) ones.
kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (3, 3))
# Morphological operation to detect verticle lines from an image
img_temp1 = cv2.erode(gray, verticle_kernel, iterations=3)
verticle_lines_img = cv2.dilate(img_temp1, verticle_kernel, iterations=3)
Instead of trying to find horizontal/vertical lines to detect the text document, a simple contour filtering approach should work here. The idea is to threshold the image to obtain a binary image then find contours and sort using contour area. The largest contour should be the text document. We can then apply a four point perspective transform to obtain a birds eye view of the image. Here's the results:
Input image:
Output:
Notice how the output image only has the desired text document and is aligned without a skewed angle.
Code
from imutils.perspective import four_point_transform
import cv2
import numpy
# Load image, grayscale, Gaussian blur, Otsu's threshold
image = cv2.imread("1.jpg")
gray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
blur = cv2.GaussianBlur(gray, (3,3), 0)
thresh = cv2.threshold(blur, 0, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV + cv2.THRESH_OTSU)[1]
# Find contours and sort for largest contour
cnts = cv2.findContours(thresh, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL,cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
cnts = cnts[0] if len(cnts) == 2 else cnts[1]
cnts = sorted(cnts, key=cv2.contourArea, reverse=True)
displayCnt = None
for c in cnts:
# Perform contour approximation
peri = cv2.arcLength(c, True)
approx = cv2.approxPolyDP(c, 0.02 * peri, True)
if len(approx) == 4:
displayCnt = approx
break
# Obtain birds' eye view of image
warped = four_point_transform(image, displayCnt.reshape(4, 2))
cv2.imshow("thresh", thresh)
cv2.imshow("warped", warped)
cv2.imshow("image", image)
cv2.waitKey()
I am trying to have the circle detected in the following image.
So I did color thresholding and finally got this result.
Because of the lines in the center being removed, the circle is split into many small parts, so if I do contour detection on this, it can only give me each contour separately.
But is there a way I can somehow combine the contours so I could get a circle instead of just pieces of it?
Here is my code for color thresholding:
blurred = cv2.GaussianBlur(img, (9,9), 9)
ORANGE_MIN = np.array((12, 182, 221),np.uint8)
ORANGE_MAX = np.array((16, 227, 255),np.uint8)
hsv_disk = cv2.cvtColor(blurred,cv2.COLOR_BGR2HSV)
disk_threshed = cv2.inRange(hsv_disk, ORANGE_MIN, ORANGE_MAX)
The task is much easier when performed with the red plane only.
I guess there was problem with the thresholds for color segmentation, So the idea here was to generate a binary mask. By inspection your region of interest seems to be brighter than the other regions of input image, so thresholding can simply be done on a grayScale image to simplify the context. Note: You may change this step as per your requirement. After satisfying with the threshold output, you may use cv2.convexHull() to get the convex shape of your contour.
Also keep in mind to select the largest contour and ignore the small contours. The following code can be used to generate the required output:
import cv2
import numpy as np
# Loading the input_image
img = cv2.imread("/Users/anmoluppal/Downloads/3xGG4.jpg")
# Converting the input image to grayScale
img_gray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
# Thresholding the image to get binary mask.
ret, img_thresh = cv2.threshold(img_gray, 145, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
# Dilating the mask image
kernel = np.ones((3,3),np.uint8)
dilation = cv2.dilate(img_thresh,kernel,iterations = 3)
# Getting all the contours
_, contours, __ = cv2.findContours(dilation, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE)
# Finding the largest contour Id
largest_contour_area = 0
largest_contour_area_idx = 0
for i in xrange(len(contours)):
if (cv2.contourArea(contours[i]) > largest_contour_area):
largest_contour_area = cv2.contourArea(contours[i])
largest_contour_area_idx = i
# Get the convex Hull for the largest contour
hull = cv2.convexHull(contours[largest_contour_area_idx])
# Drawing the contours for debugging purposes.
img = cv2.drawContours(img, [hull], 0, [0, 255, 0])
cv2.imwrite("./garbage.png", img)