I have two recordings from security cameras which are located on opposite corners. Each of the cameras has a dead spot (image attached).
I am looking for a technique in python that allows creating a map of the objects in the room space based on these two cameras' views.
Can you please suggest something?
Problem definition
Given two images from the same scene, stitch these images side-by-side by finding common parts (features) that overlap with each other.
Approach
In theory, the steps followed to solve the problem are as follows:
Detect feature points using Harris corner detection.
Create key-point descriptors by creating patches around them
Estimate key-point matches based on the Euclidean distance
Perform RANSAC to find the affine transformation matrix
Warp and apply geometric transformation
For the abovementioned steps you can refer to the OpenCV tutorial and other libraries that might come in use for some specific step sklearn.feature module used on the feature extraction step.
Also, you can find many image stitching projects on github in case you don't want to reinvent the wheel.
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!
I currently have 2 paths generated by a motion planning algorithm in Python. I interpolated into two 3D Polylines with equidistant points. Next I need to find whether these two paths of different lengths intersect (OR even ideally the point(s) at which they get near a certain distance of each other, if any). This is to eventually simulate a collision avoidance algorithm.
After much searching I have found multiple libraries and algorithms that can return points/line intersections of two Polylines, however they are all in 2D. I tried using the Bentley-Ottmann algorithm/python library, the Shapely library, the Geometry3D library, and other 2D solutions found on SO, but none have worked in a 3D environment. Next I tried using a 2D geometry library to find the intersections in the x-y, x-z, and y-z planes individually as shown in the graphs below showing a simple case, but I'm not sure where to go from there or whether that's even the right approach. The Polylines would usually contain 300+ points.
Any help pointing me towards a 3D algorithm or simple adjustments to make to the 2D libraries work in 3D would be really appreciated!
3D graph view, x-y view, z-y view.
If I take a picture with a camera, so I know the distance from the camera to the object, such as a scale model of a house, I would like to turn this into a 3D model that I can maneuver around so I can comment on different parts of the house.
If I sit down and think about taking more than one picture, labeling direction, and distance, I should be able to figure out how to do this, but, I thought I would ask if someone has some paper that may help explain more.
What language you explain in doesn't matter, as I am looking for the best approach.
Right now I am considering showing the house, then the user can put in some assistance for height, such as distance from the camera to the top of that part of the model, and given enough of this it would be possible to start calculating heights for the rest, especially if there is a top-down image, then pictures from angles on the four sides, to calculate relative heights.
Then I expect that parts will also need to differ in color to help separate out the various parts of the model.
As mentioned, the problem is very hard and is often also referred to as multi-view object reconstruction. It is usually approached by solving the stereo-view reconstruction problem for each pair of consecutive images.
Performing stereo reconstruction requires that pairs of images are taken that have a good amount of visible overlap of physical points. You need to find corresponding points such that you can then use triangulation to find the 3D co-ordinates of the points.
Epipolar geometry
Stereo reconstruction is usually done by first calibrating your camera setup so you can rectify your images using the theory of epipolar geometry. This simplifies finding corresponding points as well as the final triangulation calculations.
If you have:
the intrinsic camera parameters (requiring camera calibration),
the camera's position and rotation (it's extrinsic parameters), and
8 or more physical points with matching known positions in two photos (when using the eight-point algorithm)
you can calculate the fundamental and essential matrices using only matrix theory and use these to rectify your images. This requires some theory about co-ordinate projections with homogeneous co-ordinates and also knowledge of the pinhole camera model and camera matrix.
If you want a method that doesn't need the camera parameters and works for unknown camera set-ups you should probably look into methods for uncalibrated stereo reconstruction.
Correspondence problem
Finding corresponding points is the tricky part that requires you to look for points of the same brightness or colour, or to use texture patterns or some other features to identify the same points in pairs of images. Techniques for this either work locally by looking for a best match in a small region around each point, or globally by considering the image as a whole.
If you already have the fundamental matrix, it will allow you to rectify the images such that corresponding points in two images will be constrained to a line (in theory). This helps you to use faster local techniques.
There is currently still no ideal technique to solve the correspondence problem, but possible approaches could fall in these categories:
Manual selection: have a person hand-select matching points.
Custom markers: place markers or use specific patterns/colours that you can easily identify.
Sum of squared differences: take a region around a point and find the closest whole matching region in the other image.
Graph cuts: a global optimisation technique based on optimisation using graph theory.
For specific implementations you can use Google Scholar to search through the current literature. Here is one highly cited paper comparing various techniques:
A Taxonomy and Evaluation of Dense Two-Frame Stereo Correspondence Algorithms.
Multi-view reconstruction
Once you have the corresponding points, you can then use epipolar geometry theory for the triangulation calculations to find the 3D co-ordinates of the points.
This whole stereo reconstruction would then be repeated for each pair of consecutive images (implying that you need an order to the images or at least knowledge of which images have many overlapping points). For each pair you would calculate a different fundamental matrix.
Of course, due to noise or inaccuracies at each of these steps you might want to consider how to solve the problem in a more global manner. For instance, if you have a series of images that are taken around an object and form a loop, this provides extra constraints that can be used to improve the accuracy of earlier steps using something like bundle adjustment.
As you can see, both stereo and multi-view reconstruction are far from solved problems and are still actively researched. The less you want to do in an automated manner the more well-defined the problem becomes, but even in these cases quite a bit of theory is required to get started.
Alternatives
If it's within the constraints of what you want to do, I would recommend considering dedicated hardware sensors (such as the XBox's Kinect) instead of only using normal cameras. These sensors use structured light, time-of-flight or some other range imaging technique to generate a depth image which they can also combine with colour data from their own cameras. They practically solve the single-view reconstruction problem for you and often include libraries and tools for stitching/combining multiple views.
Epipolar geometry references
My knowledge is actually quite thin on most of the theory, so the best I can do is to further provide you with some references that are hopefully useful (in order of relevance):
I found a PDF chapter on Multiple View Geometry that contains most of the critical theory. In fact the textbook Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision should also be quite useful (sample chapters available here).
Here's a page describing a project on uncalibrated stereo reconstruction that seems to include some source code that could be useful. They find matching points in an automated manner using one of many feature detection techniques. If you want this part of the process to be automated as well, then SIFT feature detection is commonly considered to be an excellent non-real-time technique (since it's quite slow).
A paper about Scene Reconstruction from Multiple Uncalibrated Views.
A slideshow on Methods for 3D Reconstruction from Multiple Images (it has some more references below it's slides towards the end).
A paper comparing different multi-view stereo reconstruction algorithms can be found here. It limits itself to algorithms that "reconstruct dense object models from calibrated views".
Here's a paper that goes into lots of detail for the case that you have stereo cameras that take multiple images: Towards robust metric reconstruction
via a dynamic uncalibrated stereo head. They then find methods to self-calibrate the cameras.
I'm not sure how helpful all of this is, but hopefully it includes enough useful terminology and references to find further resources.
Research has made significant progress and these days it is possible to obtain pretty good-looking 3D shapes from 2D images. For instance, in our recent research work titled "Synthesizing 3D Shapes via Modeling Multi-View Depth Maps and Silhouettes With Deep Generative Networks" took a big step in solving the problem of obtaining 3D shapes from 2D images. In our work, we show that you can not only go from 2D to 3D directly and get a good, approximate 3D reconstruction but you can also learn a distribution of 3D shapes in an efficient manner and generate/synthesize 3D shapes. Below is an image of our work showing that we are able to do 3D reconstruction even from a single silhouette or depth map (on the left). The ground-truth 3D shapes are shown on the right.
The approach we took has some contributions related to cognitive science or the way the brain works: the model we built shares parameters for all shape categories instead of being specific to only one category. Also, it obtains consistent representations and takes the uncertainty of the input view into account when producing a 3D shape as output. Therefore, it is able to naturally give meaningful results even for very ambiguous inputs. If you look at the citation to our paper you can see even more progress just in terms of going from 2D images to 3D shapes.
This problem is known as Photogrammetry.
Google will supply you with endless references, just be aware that if you want to roll your own, it's a very hard problem.
Check out The Deadalus Project, althought that website does not contain a gallery with illustrative information about the solution, it post several papers and info about the working method.
I watched a lecture from one of the main researchers of the project (Roger Hubbold), and the image results are quite amazing! Althought is a complex and long problem. It has a lot of tricky details to take into account to get an approximation of the 3d data, take for example the 3d information from wall surfaces, for which the heuristic to work is as follows: Take a photo with normal illumination of the scene, and then retake the picture in same position with full flash active, then substract both images and divide the result by a pre-taken flash calibration image, apply a box filter to this new result and then post-process to estimate depth values, the whole process is explained in detail in this paper (which is also posted/referenced in the project website)
Google Sketchup (free) has a photo matching tool that allows you to take a photograph and match its perspective for easy modeling.
EDIT: It appears that you're interested in developing your own solution. I thought you were trying to obtain a 3D model of an image in a single instance. If this answer isn't helpful, I apologize.
Hope this helps if you are trying to construct 3d volume from 2d stack of images !! You can use open source tool such as ImageJ Fiji which comes with 3d viewer plugin..
https://quppler.com/creating-a-classifier-using-image-j-fiji-for-3d-volume-data-preparation-from-stack-of-images/
I have written a program in Python which automatically reads score sheets like this one
At the moment I am using the following basic strategy:
Deskew the image using ImageMagick
Read into Python using PIL, converting the image to B&W
Calculate calculate the sums of pixels in the rows and the columns
Find peaks in these sums
Check the intersections implied by these peaks for fill.
The result of running the program is shown in this image:
You can see the peak plots below and to the right of the image shown in the top left. The lines in the top left image are the positions of the columns and the red dots show the identified scores. The histogram bottom right shows the fill levels of each circle, and the classification line.
The problem with this method is that it requires careful tuning, and is sensitive to differences in scanning settings. Is there a more robust way of recognising the grid, which will require less a-priori information (at the moment I am using knowledge about how many dots there are) and is more robust to people drawing other shapes on the sheets? I believe it may be possible using a 2D Fourier Transform, but I'm not sure how.
I am using the EPD, so I have quite a few libraries at my disposal.
First of all, I find your initial method quite sound and I would have probably tried the same way (I especially appreciate the row/column projection followed by histogramming, which is an underrated method that is usually quite efficient in real applications).
However, since you want to go for a more robust processing pipeline, here is a proposal that can probably be fully automated (also removing at the same time the deskewing via ImageMagick):
Feature extraction: extract the circles via a generalized Hough transform. As suggested in other answers, you can use OpenCV's Python wrapper for that. The detector may miss some circles but this is not important.
Apply a robust alignment detector using the circle centers.You can use Desloneux parameter-less detector described here. Don't be afraid by the math, the procedure is quite simple to implement (and you can find example implementations online).
Get rid of diagonal lines by a selection on the orientation.
Find the intersections of the lines to get the dots. You can use these coordinates for deskewing by assuming ideal fixed positions for these intersections.
This pipeline may be a bit CPU-intensive (especially step 2 that will proceed to some kind of greedy search), but it should be quite robust and automatic.
The correct way to do this is to use Connected Component analysis on the image, to segment it into "objects". Then you can use higher level algorithms (e.g. hough transform on the components centroids) to detect the grid and also determine for each cell whether it's on/off, by looking at the number of active pixels it contains.