I am trying to write a script in Python using OpenCV that will find, track, and output the positions of multiple markers on a person performing an exercise in a video. However, the markers were not properly lit up at the time of video capture, and so as a result they appear the same color as much of the background - an unspectacular, non-reflective grey. This is a problem when it comes to pulling them out. Even when converting the image to HSV, it seems impossible to filter out the surroundings (subject's clothes, the walls, the ceiling, etc) without the markers vanishing too. And as far as finding contours goes, there's so much going on in any particular frame that the number of contours found is pretty high and the markers themselves are not necessarily the smallest detected, so I can't just assuming 'min(contours)' as many tutorials try to do.
I've tried to isolate the markers using several different methods, mostly involving manipulating the mask/HSV image, but also some others, such as SimpleBlobDetector and finding keypoints. The best method I can think of is using keypoint detection to manually select the points of interest, but even those don't always pick up the markers.
I can't share a full-size sample image since it's a person in the videos I'm using, but some notes on the situation:
I can't retake the video to do the markers correctly. This data wasn't originally taken for more than camera alignment, so no one was too concerned about marker illumination. The data sucks, but it's all I have to work with.
Skin is very easy to filter out for the most part, but outlines of the clothes, environment, and skin always remain.
in the image above, the user is holding the exercise bar. there's a marker just under the center of the image, and another further up the arm. The spots towards the right edge are not markers. H(0, 26), S(0,57), V(0,255)
Markers really are basically the same color as the wall and ceiling.
TL;DR: I need a way to grab non-reflective markers in a busy environment with as little user input as possible. Data can't simply be re-taken, and methods typical for acquiring motion capture data are not working out here.
Related
I am dealing with some images which contain tables and there are 1 or 2 stickers on them. What I am trying to do is getting rid of those stickers. Using color thresholding (in HSV) and contour detection I am able to create a mask for those stickers. Now I want those stickers to "dissolve" out from there (I don't know the correct term for this). While keeping those tables lines intact, so that my line detection works well (which I have to do after this cleaning).
I tried OpenCV's inpaint. But this doesn't work well here, because the sticker size is big enough.
See this example:
Part of the whole image where the sticker is sticking (inside contents are censored by me). It can be over horizontal lines, or vertical lines, or both. Basically, it's sticking somewhere on the table (maybe over some text too, but that can't be recovered anyway). The background won't be necessary whitish, it can be pink/orange/other colors.
This is the thresholded image, creating a mask of the sticker. We can also get the contour of this if required.
This is the result of cv.inpaint() with radius 3.
What I want is to reconstruct those lines.
My solution
Now my approach is to interpolate the colors in between the sticker contour, to fill it up. For each pixel inside the contour, I will do a vertical interpolation and a horizontal interpolation (interpolation of the boundary colors) and then fill that pixel with the average of both. I am hoping that this will preserve my vertical and horizontal lines at least. (Might fail if it's on a corner of the table). This will also keep the background smooth, my background can have some different colors.
Now my problem is how I can implement this. What I have are contours that I find using OpenCV's get_contours(). I don't know how to get the colors on its boundary and how to interpolate the in-between colors.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Due to confidentiality, I cannot share the whole image.
EDIT
I tried the seam-carving method (implementation). Here are the results:
Vertical seaming
Horizontal seaming
It works well once I know which one to use. And I am not sure how well it will do when we have both horizontal and vertical lines.
PS. Don't suggest a solution which needs to find lines and then work. Because there will be many lines in my whole image.
You can make synthetic example images. To better explain your issue.
As I got it you can use Poisson image editing. Just take a piece of clear paper image and paste it using poisson blending and the mask you extracted.
Check this github repo as instance for examples with code.
I'm working on creating a tile server from some raster nautical charts (maps) i've paid for access, and i'm trying to post-process the raw image data that these charts are distributed as, prior to geo-referencing them and slicing them up into tiles
i've got a two sets of tasks and would greatly appreciate any help or even sample code on how to get these done in an automated way. i'm no stranger to python/jupyter notebooks but have zero experience with this type of data-science to do image analysis/processing using things like opencv/machine learning (or if there's a better toolkit library that i'm not even yet aware of).
i have some sample images (originals are PNG but too big to upload so i encoded them in high-quality JPEGs to follow along/provide sample data).. here's what i'm trying to get done:
validation of all image data.. the first chart (as well as last four) demonstrate what properly formatted charts images should looks like (i manually added a few colored rectangles to the first, to highlight different parts of the image in the bonus section below)
some images will either have missing tile data, as in the 2nd sample image, these are ALWAYS chunks of 256x256 image data, so should be straightforward to identify black boxes of this exact size..
some images will have corrupt/misplaced tiles as in the 3rd image (notice in the center/upper half of the image is a large colorful semi-circle/arcs, it is slightly duplicated beneath and if you look along horizontally you can see the image data is shifted and so these tiles have been corrupted somehow
extraction of information, ultimately once all image data is verified to be valid (the above steps are ensured), there is a few bit of data i really need pulled out of the image, the most important of which is
the 4 coordinates (upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right) of the internal chart frame, in the first image they are highlighted in a small pink box at each corner (the other images don't have them but they are located in a simlar way) - NOTE, because these are geographic coordinates and involve projections, they are NOT always 100% horizontal/vertical of each other.
the critical bit is that SOME images container more than one "chartlet", i really need to obtain the above 4 coordinate for EACH chartlet (some charts have no chartlets, some two to several of them, and they are not always simple rectangular shapes), i may be able to generate for input the number of chartlets if that helps..
if possible, what would also help is extracting each chartlet as a separate image (each of these have a single capital letter, A, B, C in a circle that would be good if it appeared in the filename)
as a bonus, if there was a way to also extract the sections sampled in the first sample image (in the lower left corner), this would probably involve recognize where/if in the image this appears (would probably only appear once per file but not certain) and then extracting based on its coordinates?
mainly the most important is inside a green box and represents a pair of tables (the left table is an example and i believe would always be the same, and the right has a variable amount of columns)
also the table in the orange box would be good to also get the text from as it's related
as would the small overview map in the blue box, can be left as an image
i have been looking at tutorials on opencv and image recognition processes but the content so far has been highly elementary not to mention an overwhelming endless list of algorithms for different operations (which again i don't know which i'd even need), so i'm not sure how it relates to what i'm trying to do.. really i don't even know where to begin to structure the steps needed for undertaking all these tasks or how each should be broken down further to ease the processing.
I'm trying to extract text from a scanned technical drawing. For confidentiality reasons, I cannot post the actual drawing, but it looks similar to this, but a lot busier with more text within shapes. The problem is quite complex due to issues with letters touching both each other and it's surrounding borders / symbols.
I found an interesting paper that does exactly this called "Detection of Text Regions From Digital Engineering Drawings" by Zhaoyang Lu. It's behind a paywall so you might not be able to access it, but essentially it tries to erase everything that's not text from the image through mainly two steps:
1) Erases linear components, including long and short isolated lines
2) Erases non-text strokes in terms of analysis of connected components of strokes
What kind of OpenCV functions would help in performing these operations? I would rather not write something from the ground up to do these, but I suspect I might have to.
I've tried using a template-based approach to try to isolate the text, but since the text location isn't completely normalized between drawings (even in the same project), it fails in detecting text past the first scanned figure.
I am working on a similar problem. Technical drawings are an issue because OCR software mostly tries to find text baselines and the drawing artifacts (lines etc) get in the way of that approach. In the drawing you specified there are not many characters touching each other. So I suggest to break the image into contiguous (black) pixels and then scan those individually. The height of the contiguous areas should give you also an indication if the contiguous area is text, or a piece of the drawing. To break the image into contiguous pixels, use a flood fill algorithm, and for the scanning Tesseract does a good job.
Obviously I've never attempted this specific task, however if the image really looks like the one you showed me I would start by removing all vertical and horizontal lines. This could be done pretty easily, just set a width threshold and for all pixels with intensity larger than some N value, and after that look the threshold amount of pixels perpendicular to the hypothethic line orientation. If it looks like a line erase it.
More elegant and perhaps better would be to do a hough transform for lines and circles and remove those elements that way.
Also you could maybe try some FFT based filtering, but I'm not so sure about that.
I've never used OpenCV but i would guess it can do the things i mentioned.
My question is rather about feasibility of a task.
Note that I have read the solution of this question, however you can guess I am not dealing with rectangles and cameras here.
Situation:
I need to save lot of pictures in a folder all of them obeying to these rules:
In each picture, there is ONLY one object.
The object can be anything (car, horse, human hand ...)
The size and the format of the picture belong to certain set.
The background of the object is ALWAYS white.
The color of the object itself can be anything else (including, why not, areas of white pixels)
Goal:
I want to detect if the object of each image is CENTERED.
Development environment:
Python
OpenCV
Do you think this is feasible ?
I hope my question is not too broad. I just ask if this can be done automatically without human intervention on the pictures. I have thousands of them. The program will save in a separate folder pictures in which the object is not centered.
EDIT:
Following the comments and answer above: for me, a centered object is the one if I draw a square or rectangle around it, the edges of the square/rectangle must be equivalently distant from let and right sides of the image, whereas the top and the bottom of the object must be equivalently distant from the top and bottom of the picture.
Yep this is very feasible. However, depending on the type of objects the images contain, they are different ways to accomplish this. Assuming the objects in the images all have a uniform color you can easily perform a color detection algorithm, find the centre point of the object in terms of pixels and find it's position using the image resolution as the reference.
As the background is always white as specified, this is probably your best method as you can just extract all the non white (Or different shade of white) objects within the image.
if you do decide to go with this approach, i should be able to point you to some relevant code
Although writing in c++, more information on this can be found in the link below.
http://opencv-srf.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/object-detection-using-color-seperation.html
the link is based on object detection in a video but as a video is just a series images the same concept can be used on images
I want to apply a detector algorithm to detect empty areas of parking and I have read about SIFT and SURF, but I can't quite understand it. I have seen examples of comparison between two images, but that's not what I want. Could you explain about how to use SURF or SIFT on the issue of detecting empty spots on parking?
I have also read about color histogram, can I have some documentation about it?
I am working with OpenCV python 2.4.9 and 2.7
It depends on what you exactly want to achieve - if just want to find an empty spot and your camera higher than parking, it's quite possible that finding spots in color of road (most likely asphalt) will be enough for you(see http://docs.opencv.org/modules/core/doc/operations_on_arrays.html#cv2.inRange). Of course you have to manually find lower and upper boundary (don't forget about lighting differences - asphalt will have different color at night, probably it will be easier to find good boundaries using HSV color space) and filter parts of parking which are not empty areas (roads etc.).
BTW - look at this Using OpenCV to detect parking spots