Develop Reference

Finding contour around a cluster of pixels

I have a set of images that look like this:
Using python need a way to find a contour around the yellow shape that ignores the isolated points and is not too complex. Something looking a bit like this :
I tried some methods such as the find_contours function from skimage,which gives this after keeping only the biggest contour:
which is not what I am looking for. A also tried active contour (snake) which had the problem of paying too much attention to isolated pixels. Is there a particular method that would help me in this situation ?
Thank you

Assuming the yellow blob is slightly different across your images, I recommend you look into either using Morphological Operations, or using Contour Approximation.
I've never used scikit-image, but it appears to have Morphological functionalities included.
You can take a look at this OpenCV tutorial for a quick guideline of the different operations.
But I think all you need is to use the "Opening" operation to preprocess your yellow shape; making it smoother and removing the random speckles.
Another approach is by approximating that contour you've extracted to make it smoother. For scikit-image, that is the measure.approximate_polygon function. Also another OpenCV tutorial for reference on how Contour Approximation works (the same algorithm as with scikit-image).

Find symmetry point/center point in an irregular image

I am trying to find symmetry lines or points in my image
My main aim is to find the center of this contour. But I can't use thresholding, so can't use OpenCV contours.
So my next guess it to find symmetric point in my image and hopefully that will correspond to the center of this contour. Any other idea to find center of this contour is also appreciated, something which doesn't involve thresholding as I can't give parameters to user.
I tried finding centroid using cv moments but that didn't give me good results.
I tried using hough circle detection, but it couldn't detect this as circle.
I am using python and OpenCV.

The question is rather vague, lacking adequate sample images and there is little feedback to comments, so it is a stab in the dark as whether you are having difficulty separating the objects, or finding their lines of symmetry, but I wanted to point out that ImageMagick does a pretty good job of separating the objects using the algorithm described here.
Here it is from command line with dithering suppressed:
magick IuOWe.jpg +dither -colors 3 result.jpg
And here with initial blurring:
magick IuOWe.jpg -blur 0x5 +dither -colors 3 result.jpg
Of course you can use similar techniques with OpenCV, or scikit-image as you have tagged Python - it is just quicker to demonstrate my avenue of thought using ImageMagick.

How to calculate a facial point grid using OpenCV and Python?

I'm trying to automatically draw a mesh or grid over a face, similar to the image below, to use the result in a blog post that I'm writing. However, my knowledge of computer vision is not enough to recognize which model or algorithm is behind these types of cool visualizations.
Could someone help pointing me some link to reador or a starting point?
Using Python, OpenCV and dlib the closest thing I found is something called delauny triangulation but I'm not sure if that's exactly what I'm looking for seeing the results.
Putting it in a few words what I have so far is:
Detect all faces on image and calculate their landmarks using dlib.get_frontal_face_detector() and dlib.shape_predictor() methods from dlib.
Use the method cv2.Subdiv2D() from OpenCV to compute a 2D subdivision based on my landmarks. In particulary I'm getting the delauny subdivision using the getTriangleList() method from the resulting subdivision.
The complete code is available here.
However, the result is not so attractive perhaps because the division is using triangles instead of polygons and I want to check if I can improve it!

"hard" supervision in image segmentation with python

There are several packages and methods for segmentation in Python. However, if I know apriori that certain pixels (and no others) correspond to a particular object, how can I use that to segment other objects?
Which methods implemented in python would lend themselves to this approach?
Thanks.

You'll want to take a look at semi-automated image segmentation. Image segmentation in a semi-automated perspective means that you know before hand what class certain pixels belong to - either foreground or background. Given this a priori information, the goal is to minimize an energy function that best segments the rest of the pixels into foreground and background.
The best two methods that I know of are Graph Cuts and Random Walks. If you want to study the fundamentals of both of them, you should read the canonical papers by Boykov (Graph Cuts) and Grady (Random Walks) respectively:
Graph Cuts - Boykov: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~yuri/Papers/ijcv06.pdf
Random Walks - Grady: http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~nray1/CMPUT615/MRF/grady2006random.pdf
For Graph Cuts, OpenCV uses the GrabCut algorithm, which is an extension of the original Graph Cuts algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrabCut. Essentially, you surround a box around the object you want segmented, and Gaussian Mixture Models are used to model the foreground and background and the object will be segmented from the background inside this box. Additionally, you can add foreground and background markers inside the box to further constrain the solution to ensure you get a good result.
Take a look at this official OpenCV tutorial for more details: http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/doc/py_tutorials/py_imgproc/py_grabcut/py_grabcut.html
For Random Walks, this is implemented in the scikit-image library and here's a great tutorial on how to get the segmentation up and running off of their official website: http://scikit-image.org/docs/dev/auto_examples/plot_random_walker_segmentation.html
Good luck!

Given a contour outlining the edges of an 'S' shape in OpenCV/Python, what methods can be used to trace a curve along the center of the shape?

Given a contour outlining the edge of the letter S (in comic sans for example), how can I get a series of points along the spine of this letter in order to later represent this shape using lines, cubic spline or other curve-representing technique? I want to process and represent the shape using 30-40 points in Python/OpenCV.
Morphological skeletonization could help with this but the operation always seems to produce erroneous branches. Is there a better way to collapse the contour into just the 'S' shape of the letter?
In the example below you can see the erroneous 'serpent's tongue' like branches that are produced by morphological skeletonization. I don't know if it's fair to say they are erroneous if that's what the algorithm is supposed to be doing, but for me I would not like them to be there.
Below is the comic sans alphabet:
Another problem with skeletonization is that it is computationally expensive, but if you know a way of making it robust to forming 'serpent's tongue' like branches then I will give it a try.

Actually vectorizing fonts isn't trivial problem and quite tricky. To properly vectorize fonts using bezier curve you'll need tracing. There are many library you can use for tracing image, for example Potrace. I'm not knowledgeable using python but based on my experience, I have done similar project using c++ described below:
A. Fit the contour using cubic bezier
This method is quite simple although a lot of work should be done. I believe this also works well if you want to fit skeletons obtained from thinning.
Find contour/edge of the object, you can use OpenCV function findContours()
The entire shape can't be represented using a single cubic bezier, so divide them to several segments using Ramer-Douglas-Peucker (RDP). The important thing in this step, don't delete any points, use RDP only to segment the points. See colored segments on image below.
For each segments, where S is a set of n points S = (s0, s1,...Sn), fit a cubic bezier using Least Square Fitting
Illustration of least square fitting:
B. Resolution Resolution Independent Curve Rendering
This method as described in this paper is quite complex but one of the best algorithms available to display vector fonts:
Find contour (the same with method A)
Use RDP, differently from method A, use RDP to remove points so the contour can be simplified.
Do delaunay triangulation.
Draw bezier curve on the outer edges using method described in the paper

The following simple idea might be usefull.
Calculate Medial axis of the outer contour. This would ensure connectivity of the curves.
Find out the branch points. Depending on its length you can delete them in order to eliminate "serpent's tongue" problem.
Hope it helps.