latent fingerprint segmentation (finding roi) - python

I'm trying to make an algorithm that finds the roi of a latent fingerprint. There is no need for minutiae extraction or image enhancement (though some may be necessary), it only needs to find the region of the image that contains the actual fingerprint. I have tried several approaches, applying local ridge orientation and binarization and thinning to try to find a way to identify the roi. However my results have been lackluster at every turn. I've tried to read a lot of books and papers on this subject, but they are vague at best. Any thoughts on how to achieve this? Currently programming in python

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OpenCV, python - detect and removing objects / buildings in an image

I am new to python and opencv. I am analysing images of clouds, and I need to remove the buildings, so that the subsequent analysis will have less noise. I tried using Canny edge detection and then fill in the contours, but did not get too far. I also tried thresholding by pixel colours, but cannot reliably exclude just the buildings and not other parts of the image containing the clouds.
Is there a way I can efficiently and accurately remove the buildings and keep all of the clouds/sky? Thanks for the tips in advance.
You could use a computer vision model that finds the buildings. There may be some open source ones out there. The only one I can think of at the moment is this semantic segmentation model. There should be details on how to implement it, but there could definitely be others out there.
https://github.com/CSAILVision/semantic-segmentation-pytorch
I think one of the classes is buildings and you could theoretically run the model and get the dimensions of the building and take it out.

Simple python region growing image segmentation tool?

I was wondering if there was a simple python toolkit for region-based image segmentation. I have a grayscale image, and my goal is to efficiently find a complete segmentation such that the pixel values in each region are similar (presumably the definition of "similar" will be determined by some tolerance parameter). I am looking for an instance segmentation where every pixel belongs exactly one region.
I have looked at the scikit-image segmentation module (https://scikit-image.org/docs/dev/api/skimage.segmentation.html), but the tools there didn't seem to do what I was looking for. For instance, skimage.segmentation.watershed looked attractive, but gave poor results using markers=None.
The flood fill algorithm from scikit-image seems close to what you want, has a tolerance parameter as well.
For more fine-tuned control you can check out OpenCV

How to find correspondences among the features detected in two images?

I have two planar images taken from different viewpoints. I implemented feature detectors like Harris, Shi-Tomasi, ORB, FAST, MSER, etc. The descriptors I used are ORB and BRISK and feature matching technique s are FLANN and BRUTE. A lot of features were detected ranging from 1000-3000. I want to find the correspondences between two images. Everything I have done is in OpenCV Python. I don't necessarily want to understand the math. I already have the homography. Now I just want a code for calculating the correspondences.
Can anyone please help me?

Cell segmentation

I'm newbie in computer vision. My goal is to distinguish individual cells on a set of pictures like this: Example
Basically, I blur whole image, find region maximum on it and use it like seed in watershed algorithm on distance tranfsform of threesholded blurred image. In fact I'm following tutorial which you can find here:
github/luispedro/python-image-tutorial
(sorry, can't post more than 2 links).
My problem is that some cells in my set have very distinguishable dark nucleus (which you can see on the example) and my algorithm produce results like this which are cleary wrong.
Of course it's possible to fix it by increasing strength of gaussian blur but it will merge some other cells toghether which is even worse.
What can be done to solve this problem? What are other possibilites if watershed just isn't situable for this case (keeping in mind that my set is pretty small and learning seems impossible)?
The watershed tends to over-segment if you don't use a watershed with markers.
Usually, we start with DNA/DAPI segmentation that is easy, and it provides the number of cells and the inner markers for the watershed.
If you blur the images, you smooth all the patterns. You should use an alternate sequential filter (opening / closing) in order to simplify each zone, and then try an ultimate eroded in order to find the number of inner seed for your watershed.

OCR of low-resolution text from screenshots

I'm writing an OCR application to read characters from a screenshot image. Currently, I'm focusing only on digits. I'm partially basing my approach on this blog post: http://blog.damiles.com/2008/11/basic-ocr-in-opencv/.
I can successfully extract each individual character using some clever thresholding. Where things get a bit tricky is matching the characters. Even with fixed font face and size, there are some variables such as background color and kerning that cause the same digit to appear in slightly different shapes. For example, the below image is segmented into 3 parts:
Top: a target digit that I successfully extracted from a screenshot
Middle: the template: a digit from my training set
Bottom: the error (absolute difference) between the top and middle images
The parts have all been scaled (the distance between the two green horizontal lines represents one pixel).
You can see that despite both the top and middle images clearly representing a 2, the error between them is quite high. This causes false positives when matching other digits -- for example, it's not hard to see how a well-placed 7 can match the target digit in the image above better than the middle image can.
Currently, I'm handling this by having a heap of training images for each digit, and matching the target digit against those images, one-by-one. I tried taking the average image of the training set, but that doesn't resolve the problem (false positives on other digits).
I'm a bit reluctant to perform matching using a shifted template (it'd be essentially the same as what I'm doing now). Is there a better way to compare the two images than simple absolute difference? I was thinking of maybe something like the EMD (earth movers distance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mover's_distance) in 2D: basically, I need a comparison method that isn't as sensitive to global shifting and small local changes (pixels next to a white pixel becoming white, or pixels next to a black pixel becoming black), but is sensitive to global changes (black pixels that are nowhere near white pixels become black, and vice versa).
Can anybody suggest a more effective matching method than absolute difference?
I'm doing all this in OpenCV using the C-style Python wrappers (import cv).
I would look into using Haar cascades. I've used them for face detection/head tracking, and it seems like you could build up a pretty good set of cascades with enough '2's, '3's, '4's, and so on.
http://alereimondo.no-ip.org/OpenCV/34
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haar-like_features
OCR on noisy images is not easy - so simple approaches no not work well.
So, I would recommend you to use HOG to extract features and SVM to classify. HOG seems to be one of the most powerful ways to describe shapes.
The whole processing pipeline is implemented in OpenCV, however I do not know the function names in python wrappers. You should be able to train with the latest haartraining.cpp - it actually supports more than haar - HOG and LBP also.
And I think the latest code (from trunk) is much improved over the official release (2.3.1).
HOG usually needs just a fraction of the training data used by other recognition methods, however, if you want to classify shapes that are partially ocludded (or missing), you should make sure you include some such shapes in training.
I can tell you from my experience and from reading several papers on character classification, that a good way to start is by reading about Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fisher's Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). These are classification methods that are extremely useful for OCR, and it turns out that OpenCV already includes excellent implementations on PCAs and SVMs. I haven't seen any OpenCV code examples for OCR, but you can use some modified version of face classification to perform character classification. An excellent resource for face recognition code for OpenCV is this website.
Another library for Python that I recommend you is "scikits.learn". It is very easy to send cvArrays to scikits.learn and run machine learning algorithms on your data. A basic example for OCR using SVM is here.
Another more complicated example using manifold learning for handwritten character recognition is here.

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