Develop Reference

Removing transparent watermark from an image - python

I am trying to remove a transparent watermark from an image.
Here is my sample image:
I would like to remove the text "Watermark" from the image. As you can see, the text is transparent. So I would like to replace that text to the original background.
Something like this would be my desired output:
I tried some examples (I am currently using cv2, if other libraries can solve the problem please also recommend), but none of them where near from succeeding. I know the way to go would be to have a mask (like in this post), but they all already have masked images, but I don't.
Here is what I tried to do to have a mask, I turned down the saturation to black and white, and created an image "imagemask.jpg", then tried going through the pixels with a for loop:
mask = cv2.imread('imagemask.jpg')
new = []
rows, cols, _ = mask.shape
for i in range(rows):
new.append([])
#print(i)
for j in range(cols):
k = img[i, j]
#print(k)
if all(x in range(110, 130) for x in k):
new[-1].append((255, 255, 255))
else:
new[-1].append((0, 0, 0))
cv2.imwrite('finalmask.jpg', np.array(new))
Then after that wanted to use the code for the mask, but I realized the "finalmask.jpg" is a complete mess... so I didn't try using the code for the mask.
Is this actually possible? I have been trying for around 3 hours but receiving no luck...

This is not trivial, my friend. To add insult to injury, your image is very low-res, compressed and has a nasty glare - that won't help processing at all. Please, look at your input and set your expectations accordingly. With that said, let's try to get the best result with what we have. These are the steps I propose:
Try to segment the watermark text from the image
Filter the segmentation mask and try to get a binary mask as clean as possible
Use the text mask to in-paint the offending area using the input image as reference
Now, the tricky part, as you already saw, is segmenting the text. After trying out some techniques and color spaces, I found that the CMYK color space - particularly the K channel - offers promising results. The text is reasonably clear and we can try an Adaptive Thresholding on this, let's take a look:
# Imports
import cv2
import numpy as np
# Read image
imagePath = "D://opencvImages//"
img = cv2.imread(imagePath+"0f5zZm.jpg")
# Store a deep copy for the inpaint operation:
originalImg = img.copy()
# Convert to float and divide by 255:
imgFloat = img.astype(np.float) / 255.
# Calculate channel K:
kChannel = 1 - np.max(imgFloat, axis=2)
OpenCV does not offer BGR to CMYK conversion directly, so I manually had to get the K channel using the conversion formula. It is very straightforward. The K (or Key) channel represents pixels of the lowest intensity (black) with color white. Meaning that the text, which is almost white, will be rendered in black... This is the K Channel of the input:
You see how the darker pixels on the input are almost white here? That's nice, it seems to get a clear separation between the text and everything else. It's a shame that we have some big nasty glare on the right side. Anyway, the conversion involves float operations, so gotta be careful with data types. Maybe we can improve this image with a little brightness/contrast adjustment. Just a little bit, I'm just trying to separate more the text from that nasty glare:
# Apply a contrast/brightness adjustment on Channel K:
alpha = 0
beta = 1.2
adjustedK = cv2.normalize(kChannel, None, alpha, beta, cv2.NORM_MINMAX, cv2.CV_32F)
# Convert back to uint 8:
adjustedK = (255*adjustedK).astype(np.uint8)
This is the adjusted image:
There's a little bit more separation between the text and the glare, it seems. Alright, let's apply an Adaptive Thresholding on this bad boy to get an initial segmentation mask:
# Adaptive Thresholding on adjusted Channel K:
windowSize = 21
windowConstant = 11
binaryImg = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(adjustedK, 255, cv2.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_MEAN_C, cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV, windowSize, windowConstant)
You see I'm using a not-so-big windowSize here for the thresholding? Feel free to tune out these parameters if you like. This is the binary image I get:
Yeah, there's a lot of noise. Here's what I propose to get a cleaner mask: There's some obvious blobs that are bigger than the text. Likewise, there are other blobs that are smaller than the text. Let's locate the big blobs and the small blobs and subtract them. The resulting image should contain the text, if we set our parameters correctly. Let's see:
# Get the biggest blobs on the image:
minArea = 180
bigBlobs = areaFilter(minArea, binaryImg)
# Filter the smallest blobs on the image:
minArea = 20
smallBlobs = areaFilter(minArea, binaryImg)
# Let's try to isolate the text:
textMask = smallBlobs - bigBlobs
cv2.imshow("Text Mask", textMask)
cv2.waitKey(0)
Here I'm using a helper function called areaFilter. This function returns all the blobs of an image that are above a minimum area threshold. I'll post the function at the end of the answer. In the meantime, check out these cool images:
Big blobs:
Filtered small blobs:
The difference between them:
Sadly, it seems that some portions of the characters didn't survive the filtering operations. That's because the intersection of the glare and the text is too much for the algorithm to get a clear separation. Something that could benefit the result of the in-painting is a subtle blur on this mask, to get rid of that compression alias. Let's apply some Gaussian Blur to smooth the mask a little bit:
# Blur the mask a little bit to get a
# smoother inpanting result:
kernelSize = (3, 3)
textMask = cv2.GaussianBlur(textMask, kernelSize, cv2.BORDER_DEFAULT)
The kernel is not that big, I just want a subtle effect. This is the result:
Finally, let's apply the in-painting:
# Apply the inpaint method:
inpaintRadius = 10
inpaintMethod = cv2.INPAINT_TELEA
result = cv2.inpaint(originalImg, textMask, inpaintRadius, inpaintMethod)
cv2.imshow("Inpaint Result", result)
cv2.waitKey(0)
This is the final result:
Well, is not that bad, considering the input image. You can try to further improve the result adjusting some values, but the reality of this life, my dude, is that the input image is not that great to begin with. Here's the areaFilter function:
def areaFilter(minArea, inputImage):
# Perform an area filter on the binary blobs:
componentsNumber, labeledImage, componentStats, componentCentroids = \
cv2.connectedComponentsWithStats(inputImage, connectivity=4)
# Get the indices/labels of the remaining components based on the area stat
# (skip the background component at index 0)
remainingComponentLabels = [i for i in range(1, componentsNumber) if componentStats[i][4] >= minArea]
# Filter the labeled pixels based on the remaining labels,
# assign pixel intensity to 255 (uint8) for the remaining pixels
filteredImage = np.where(np.isin(labeledImage, remainingComponentLabels) == True, 255, 0).astype('uint8')
return filteredImage

How to remove the background of a noisy image and extract transparent objects?

I have an image processing problem that I can't solve. I have a set of 375 images like the one below (1). I'm trying to remove the background, so to make "background substraction" (or "foreground extraction") and get only the waste on a plain background (black/white/...).
(1) Image example
I tried many things, including createBackgroundSubtractorMOG2 from OpenCV, or threshold. I also tried to remove the background pixel by pixel by subtracting it from the foreground because I have a set of 237 background images (2) (the carpet without the waste, but which is a little bit offset from the image with the objects). There are also variations in brightness on the background images.
(2) Example of a background image
Here is a code example that I was able to test and that gives me the results below (3) and (4). I use Python 3.8.3.
# Function to remove the sides of the images
def delete_side(img, x_left, x_right):
for i in range(img.shape[0]):
for j in range(img.shape[1]):
if j<=x_left or j>=x_right:
img[i,j] = (0,0,0)
return img
# Intialize the background model
backSub = cv2.createBackgroundSubtractorMOG2(history=250, varThreshold=2, detectShadows=True)
# Read the frames and update the background model
for frame in frames:
if frame.endswith(".png"):
filepath = FRAMES_FOLDER + '/' + frame
img = cv2.imread(filepath)
img_cut = delete_side(img, x_left=190, x_right=1280)
gray = cv2.cvtColor(img_cut, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
mask = backSub.apply(gray)
newimage = cv2.bitwise_or(img, img, mask=mask)
img_blurred = cv2.GaussianBlur(newimage, (5, 5), 0)
gray2 = cv2.cvtColor(img_blurred, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
_, binary = cv2.threshold(gray2, 10, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
final = cv2.bitwise_or(img, img, mask=binary)
newpath = RESULT_FOLDER + '/' + frame
cv2.imwrite(newpath, final)
I was inspired by many other cases found on Stackoverflow or others (example: removing pixels less than n size(noise) in an image - open CV python).
(3) The result obtained with the code above
(4) Result when increasing the varThreshold argument to 10
Unfortunately, there is still a lot of noise on the resulting pictures.
As a beginner in "background substraction", I don't have all the keys to get an optimal solution. If someone would have an idea to do this task in a more efficient and clean way (Is there a special method to handle the case of transparent objects? Can noise on objects be eliminated more effectively? etc.), I'm interested :)
Thanks

Thanks for your answers. For information, I simply change of methodology and use a segmentation model (U-Net) with 2 labels (foreground, background), to identify the background. It works quite well.

Classify image as washed-out or not based on the grayscale dynamic range?

I'm trying to recreate an algorithm (from this publication) on Python's OpenCV to detect if an image has a washed-out effect or not.
The paper states the following:
"Washed out images have a reduced dynamic range (in the gray-scale
image) with respect to images with natural colors. The compliance
score is simply calculated by rescaling the dynamic range of the
gray-scale image to [0;100]"
The problem is, I dont understand what a grayscale dynamic range is.
Is this about calculating the difference between the min and max pixel value of a grayscale image [0-255] and rescale that value to a range of [0-100]?

I found the paper on researchgate.com. The paper talks about the various standards that face images have to pass in order to be labelled as machine readable. Because machines unlike humans cannot understand face images under various conditions like lighting, occlusion, pose difference, etc. There was not much info regarding ICAO 13 apart from the statement in the question. So I presume it would be the following way.
Converting the gray-scale image to a dynamic range according to ICAO 13 can be done the following way:
I have taken a sample image from the OpenCV docs to illustrate this:
Code:
import cv2
import numpy as np
img = cv2.imread(path + 'wiki.jpg', 0)
print(((np.max(img) - np.min(img)) * 100) / 255)
cv2.imshow(path + 'normal.jpg', img)
equ = cv2.equalizeHist(img)
print(((np.max(equ) - np.min(equ)) * 100) / 255)
cv2.imshow(path + 'equalized.jpg', equ)
Result:
Dynamic range of original image : 36
Dynamic range of equalized image : 100
Original Image:
Equalized Image:
Now since you have the value between 0 - 100, you can select a threshold value (say 85)
and say that images having value of 85 and above are qualified as machine-readable. If the value is below the threshold, discard the image.

FFT on image with Python

I have a problem with FFT implementation in Python. I have completely strange results.
Ok so, I want to open image, get value of every pixel in RGB, then I need to use fft on it, and convert to image again.
My steps:
1) I'm opening image with PIL library in Python like this
from PIL import Image
im = Image.open("test.png")
2) I'm getting pixels
pixels = list(im.getdata())
3) I'm seperate every pixel to r,g,b values
for x in range(width):
for y in range(height):
r,g,b = pixels[x*width+y]
red[x][y] = r
green[x][y] = g
blue[x][y] = b
4). Let's assume that I have one pixel (111,111,111). And use fft on all red values like this
red = np.fft.fft(red)
And then:
print (red[0][0], green[0][0], blue[0][0])
My output is:
(53866+0j) 111 111
It's completely wrong I think. My image is 64x64, and FFT from gimp is completely different. Actually, my FFT give me only arrays with huge values, thats why my output image is black.
Do you have any idea where is problem?
[EDIT]
I've changed as suggested to
red= np.fft.fft2(red)
And after that I scale it
scale = 1/(width*height)
red= abs(red* scale)
And still, I'm getting only black image.
[EDIT2]
Ok, so lets take one image.
Assume that I dont want to open it and save as greyscale image. So I'm doing like this.
def getGray(pixel):
r,g,b = pixel
return (r+g+b)/3
im = Image.open("test.png")
im.load()
pixels = list(im.getdata())
width, height = im.size
for x in range(width):
for y in range(height):
greyscale[x][y] = getGray(pixels[x*width+y])
data = []
for x in range(width):
for y in range(height):
pix = greyscale[x][y]
data.append(pix)
img = Image.new("L", (width,height), "white")
img.putdata(data)
img.save('out.png')
After this, I'm getting this image , which is ok. So now, I want to make fft on my image before I'll save it to new one, so I'm doing like this
scale = 1/(width*height)
greyscale = np.fft.fft2(greyscale)
greyscale = abs(greyscale * scale)
after loading it. After saving it to file, I have . So lets try now open test.png with gimp and use FFT filter plugin. I'm getting this image, which is correct
How I can handle it?

Great question. I’ve never heard of it but the Gimp Fourier plugin seems really neat:
A simple plug-in to do fourier transform on you image. The major advantage of this plugin is to be able to work with the transformed image inside GIMP. You can so draw or apply filters in fourier space, and get the modified image with an inverse FFT.
This idea—of doing Gimp-style manipulation on frequency-domain data and transforming back to an image—is very cool! Despite years of working with FFTs, I’ve never thought about doing this. Instead of messing with Gimp plugins and C executables and ugliness, let’s do this in Python!
Caveat. I experimented with a number of ways to do this, attempting to get something close to the output Gimp Fourier image (gray with moiré pattern) from the original input image, but I simply couldn’t. The Gimp image appears to be somewhat symmetric around the middle of the image, but it’s not flipped vertically or horizontally, nor is it transpose-symmetric. I’d expect the plugin to be using a real 2D FFT to transform an H×W image into a H×W array of real-valued data in the frequency domain, in which case there would be no symmetry (it’s just the to-complex FFT that’s conjugate-symmetric for real-valued inputs like images). So I gave up trying to reverse-engineer what the Gimp plugin is doing and looked at how I’d do this from scratch.
The code. Very simple: read an image, apply scipy.fftpack.rfft in the leading two dimensions to get the “frequency-image”, rescale to 0–255, and save.
Note how this is different from the other answers! No grayscaling—the 2D real-to-real FFT happens independently on all three channels. No abs needed: the frequency-domain image can legitimately have negative values, and if you make them positive, you can’t recover your original image. (Also a nice feature: no compromises on image size. The size of the array remains the same before and after the FFT, whether the width/height is even or odd.)
from PIL import Image
import numpy as np
import scipy.fftpack as fp
## Functions to go from image to frequency-image and back
im2freq = lambda data: fp.rfft(fp.rfft(data, axis=0),
axis=1)
freq2im = lambda f: fp.irfft(fp.irfft(f, axis=1),
axis=0)
## Read in data file and transform
data = np.array(Image.open('test.png'))
freq = im2freq(data)
back = freq2im(freq)
# Make sure the forward and backward transforms work!
assert(np.allclose(data, back))
## Helper functions to rescale a frequency-image to [0, 255] and save
remmax = lambda x: x/x.max()
remmin = lambda x: x - np.amin(x, axis=(0,1), keepdims=True)
touint8 = lambda x: (remmax(remmin(x))*(256-1e-4)).astype(int)
def arr2im(data, fname):
out = Image.new('RGB', data.shape[1::-1])
out.putdata(map(tuple, data.reshape(-1, 3)))
out.save(fname)
arr2im(touint8(freq), 'freq.png')
(Aside: FFT-lover geek note. Look at the documentation for rfft for details, but I used Scipy’s FFTPACK module because its rfft interleaves real and imaginary components of a single pixel as two adjacent real values, guaranteeing that the output for any-sized 2D image (even vs odd, width vs height) will be preserved. This is in contrast to Numpy’s numpy.fft.rfft2 which, because it returns complex data of size width/2+1 by height/2+1, forces you to deal with one extra row/column and deal with deinterleaving complex-to-real yourself. Who needs that hassle for this application.)
Results. Given input named test.png:
this snippet produces the following output (global min/max have been rescaled and quantized to 0-255):
And upscaled:
In this frequency-image, the DC (0 Hz frequency) component is in the top-left, and frequencies move higher as you go right and down.
Now, let’s see what happens when you manipulate this image in a couple of ways. Instead of this test image, let’s use a cat photo.
I made a few mask images in Gimp that I then load into Python and multiply the frequency-image with to see what effect the mask has on the image.
Here’s the code:
# Make frequency-image of cat photo
freq = im2freq(np.array(Image.open('cat.jpg')))
# Load three frequency-domain masks (DSP "filters")
bpfMask = np.array(Image.open('cat-mask-bpfcorner.png')).astype(float) / 255
hpfMask = np.array(Image.open('cat-mask-hpfcorner.png')).astype(float) / 255
lpfMask = np.array(Image.open('cat-mask-corner.png')).astype(float) / 255
# Apply each filter and save the output
arr2im(touint8(freq2im(freq * bpfMask)), 'cat-bpf.png')
arr2im(touint8(freq2im(freq * hpfMask)), 'cat-hpf.png')
arr2im(touint8(freq2im(freq * lpfMask)), 'cat-lpf.png')
Here’s a low-pass filter mask on the left, and on the right, the result—click to see the full-res image:
In the mask, black = 0.0, white = 1.0. So the lowest frequencies are kept here (white), while the high ones are blocked (black). This blurs the image by attenuating high frequencies. Low-pass filters are used all over the place, including when decimating (“downsampling”) an image (though they will be shaped much more carefully than me drawing in Gimp 😜).
Here’s a band-pass filter, where the lowest frequencies (see that bit of white in the top-left corner?) and high frequencies are kept, but the middling-frequencies are blocked. Quite bizarre!
Here’s a high-pass filter, where the top-left corner that was left white in the above mask is blacked out:
This is how edge-detection works.
Postscript. Someone, make a webapp using this technique that lets you draw masks and apply them to an image real-time!!!

There are several issues here.
1) Manual conversion to grayscale isn't good. Use Image.open("test.png").convert('L')
2) Most likely there is an issue with types. You shouldn't pass np.ndarray from fft2 to a PIL image without being sure their types are compatible. abs(np.fft.fft2(something)) will return you an array of type np.float32 or something like this, whereas PIL image is going to receive something like an array of type np.uint8.
3) Scaling suggested in the comments looks wrong. You actually need your values to fit into 0..255 range.
Here's my code that addresses these 3 points:
import numpy as np
from PIL import Image
def fft(channel):
fft = np.fft.fft2(channel)
fft *= 255.0 / fft.max() # proper scaling into 0..255 range
return np.absolute(fft)
input_image = Image.open("test.png")
channels = input_image.split() # splits an image into R, G, B channels
result_array = np.zeros_like(input_image) # make sure data types,
# sizes and numbers of channels of input and output numpy arrays are the save
if len(channels) > 1: # grayscale images have only one channel
for i, channel in enumerate(channels):
result_array[..., i] = fft(channel)
else:
result_array[...] = fft(channels[0])
result_image = Image.fromarray(result_array)
result_image.save('out.png')
I must admit I haven't managed to get results identical to the GIMP FFT plugin. As far as I see it does some post-processing. My results are all kinda very low contrast mess, and GIMP seems to overcome this by tuning contrast and scaling down non-informative channels (in your case all chanels except Red are just empty). Refer to the image:

What's the fastest way to increase color image contrast with OpenCV in python (cv2)?

I'm using OpenCV to process some images, and one of the first steps I need to perform is increasing the image contrast on a color image. The fastest method I've found so far uses this code (where np is the numpy import) to multiply and add as suggested in the original C-based cv1 docs:
if (self.array_alpha is None):
self.array_alpha = np.array([1.25])
self.array_beta = np.array([-100.0])
# add a beta value to every pixel
cv2.add(new_img, self.array_beta, new_img)
# multiply every pixel value by alpha
cv2.multiply(new_img, self.array_alpha, new_img)
Is there a faster way to do this in Python? I've tried using numpy's scalar multiply instead, but the performance is actually worse. I also tried using cv2.convertScaleAbs (the OpenCV docs suggested using convertTo, but cv2 seems to lack an interface to this function) but again the performance was worse in testing.

Simple arithmetic in numpy arrays is the fastest, as Abid Rahaman K commented.
Use this image for example: http://i.imgur.com/Yjo276D.png
Here is a bit of image processing that resembles brightness/contrast manipulation:
'''
Simple and fast image transforms to mimic:
- brightness
- contrast
- erosion
- dilation
'''
import cv2
from pylab import array, plot, show, axis, arange, figure, uint8
# Image data
image = cv2.imread('imgur.png',0) # load as 1-channel 8bit grayscale
cv2.imshow('image',image)
maxIntensity = 255.0 # depends on dtype of image data
x = arange(maxIntensity)
# Parameters for manipulating image data
phi = 1
theta = 1
# Increase intensity such that
# dark pixels become much brighter,
# bright pixels become slightly bright
newImage0 = (maxIntensity/phi)*(image/(maxIntensity/theta))**0.5
newImage0 = array(newImage0,dtype=uint8)
cv2.imshow('newImage0',newImage0)
cv2.imwrite('newImage0.jpg',newImage0)
y = (maxIntensity/phi)*(x/(maxIntensity/theta))**0.5
# Decrease intensity such that
# dark pixels become much darker,
# bright pixels become slightly dark
newImage1 = (maxIntensity/phi)*(image/(maxIntensity/theta))**2
newImage1 = array(newImage1,dtype=uint8)
cv2.imshow('newImage1',newImage1)
z = (maxIntensity/phi)*(x/(maxIntensity/theta))**2
# Plot the figures
figure()
plot(x,y,'r-') # Increased brightness
plot(x,x,'k:') # Original image
plot(x,z, 'b-') # Decreased brightness
#axis('off')
axis('tight')
show()
# Close figure window and click on other window
# Then press any keyboard key to close all windows
closeWindow = -1
while closeWindow<0:
closeWindow = cv2.waitKey(1)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()
Original image in grayscale:
Brightened image that appears to be dilated:
Darkened image that appears to be eroded, sharpened, with better contrast:
How the pixel intensities are being transformed:
If you play with the values of phi and theta you can get really interesting outcomes. You can also implement this trick for multichannel image data.
--- EDIT ---
have a look at the concepts of 'levels' and 'curves' on this youtube video showing image editing in photoshop. The equation for linear transform creates the same amount i.e. 'level' of change on every pixel. If you write an equation which can discriminate between types of pixel (e.g. those which are already of a certain value) then you can change the pixels based on the 'curve' described by that equation.

Try this code:
import cv2
img = cv2.imread('sunset.jpg', 1)
cv2.imshow("Original image",img)
# CLAHE (Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization)
clahe = cv2.createCLAHE(clipLimit=3., tileGridSize=(8,8))
lab = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2LAB) # convert from BGR to LAB color space
l, a, b = cv2.split(lab) # split on 3 different channels
l2 = clahe.apply(l) # apply CLAHE to the L-channel
lab = cv2.merge((l2,a,b)) # merge channels
img2 = cv2.cvtColor(lab, cv2.COLOR_LAB2BGR) # convert from LAB to BGR
cv2.imshow('Increased contrast', img2)
#cv2.imwrite('sunset_modified.jpg', img2)
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()
Sunset before:
Sunset after increased contrast:

Use the cv2::addWeighted function. It will be faster than any of the other methods presented thus far. It's designed to work on two images:
dst = cv.addWeighted( src1, alpha, src2, beta, gamma[, dst[, dtype]] )
But if you use the same image twice AND you set beta to zero, you can get the effect you want
dst = cv.addWeighted( src1, alpha, src1, 0, gamma)
The big advantage to using this function is that you will not have to worry about what happens when values go below 0 or above 255. In numpy, you have to figure out how to do all of the clipping yourself. Using the OpenCV function, it does all of the clipping for you and it's fast.