How can I track extremly slow objects - python

Using OpenCV and python 2.7 I have written a script that detects and marks movement in a stream from a webcam. In order to detect movement in the image I use the RunningAvg function in openCV like so. . .
cv.RunningAvg(img, running_avg, 0.500, None)
cv.AbsDiff(img, running_avg, difference)
The overall script works great but I'm having a difficult time fine tuning it to pickup subtle motions(breathing for instance). I want to be able to target slow movements breathing specifically. I want to be able to do this without knowing things like color or size of targets ahead of time. I'm wondering if there is another method that is more suited to picking up subtle movements.

I think you should probably change the running average parameter way down to like 0.01
because 0.5 means the running average is half of the last frame.
This is assuming that breathing is the only motion in the frame. If there larger motions or the camera is moving you are going to need a more adaptive baseline.

Related

Is there a simple way to prevent GalSim from shooting all the photons from a star into a single pixel?

I'm generating PSF-free images, so no atmosphere and no diffraction, and the images I'm getting out have stars in "quantized" positions. I'm wondering if there is an option in GalSim to prevent this, i.e. to have a more sinc-like distribution of the photons, so the behaviour of photons landing somewhere between pixels is taken into account. If there isn't an option for this, I suppose I would need to create my own sinc-function PSF and implement it around the drawImage() step?
Stars are inherently supposed to look like point sources if you don't have any PSF at all (no atmosphere, no diffraction). They are a delta function in that case, so all of the photons should fall into a single pixel. GalSim is doing exactly what you are asking it to do.
It sounds like you actually do want to have a PSF; I suggest using the galsim.Airy class, representing a diffraction-limited PSF.

How do you detect if there is motion between frames using opencv without simply subtracting the frames?

I have a camera in a fixed position looking at a target and I want to detect whether someone walks in front of the target. The lighting in the scene can change so subtracting the new changed frame from the previous frame would therefore detect motion even though none has actually occurred. I have thought to compare the number of contours (obtained by using findContours() on a binary edge image obtained with canny and then getting size() of this) between the two frames as a big change here could denote movement while also being less sensitive to lighting changes, I am quite new to OpenCV and my implementations have not been successful so far. Is there a way I could make this work or will I have to just subtract the frames. I don't need to track the person, just detect whether they are in the scene.
I am a bit rusty but there are various ways to do this.
SIFT and SURF are very expensive operations, so I don't think you would want to use them.
There are a couple of 'background removal' methods.
Average removal: in this one you get the average of N frames, and consider it as BG. This is vulnerable to many things, light changes, shadow, moving object staying at a location for long time etc.
Gaussian Mixture Model: a bit more advanced than 1. Still vulnerable to a lot of things.
IncPCP (incremental principal component pursuit): I can't remember the algorithm totally but basic idea was they convert each frame to a sparse form, then extract the moving objects from sparse matrix.
Optical flow: you find the change across the temporal domain of a video. For example, you compare frame2 with frame1 block by block and tell the direction of change.
CNN based methods: I know there are a bunch of them, but I didn't really follow them. You might have to do some research. As far as I know, they often are better than the methods above.
Notice that, for a #30Fps, your code should complete in 33ms per frame, so it could be real time. You can find a lot of code available for this task.
There are a handful of ways you could do this.
The first that comes to mind is doing a 2D FFT on the incoming images. Color shouldn't affect the FFT too much, but an object moving, entering/exiting a frame will.
The second is to use SIFT or SURF to generate a list of features in an image, you can insert these points into a map, sorted however you like, then do a set_difference between the last image you took, and the current image that you have. You could also use the FLANN functionality to compare the generated features.

Optimizing webcam picture rate python/cv2

I got a BRIO 4k Logitech Webcam for a research project deducing car velocity through pictures taken of traffic. It is working fine, I am currently trying to optimize the speed of taking pics with the highest possible resolution. I am using Logitech software to disable autofocus & set it to as far as possible (focus not changeable through cv2 as far as I know).
I put my current 3 program files here:
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AvdFsPpMX-gYrA9zo-r_W340B7b8
take_photos.py is the script you need to run, just put all three in a folder and create a subfolder "pics" and it should work.
func_cam.py includes functions that the main program is calling, params_cam.py some parameters like resolution (set to max throuch the 5k/5k input).
The output will be the time taken to yield each image. Here are some typical outputs I get:
1.657
1.587
1.033
0.927
0.719
0.573
0.689
0.508
1.097
1.516
1.409
1.767
So you see quite a difference (no change in position, light condition, no moving objects in the imaging area) in times.
How can I imporve image speeds, it is still to slow for my purposes (without reducing resolution)
The second challenge I am currently facing is the big differences of image rates within a run despite almost no changes in image area or setup. Maybe there is an idea on how to stabilize this (time differences above)?
I am looking forward to your help with these challenges I am facing! Thanks for this and all the best!

Pyautogui - Problems with Changing Screenshots

ok, I've got into programming with python and thus far was having a fair amount of success. I've typed up a program that uses pyautogui to automates atask I need to do on a monthly basis.
I took Screenshots of where I needed the mouse to click and when all was done I had a working program that searched the screen for the button to clicked, controlled the mouse that location, and printed out the report I needed. So, all I needed to do was plug it into the task scheduler and it would do the work for me!
Several days afterwards, I decided to go ahead and schedule it. I ran the program again, and it crashed! Long Story short, the screen shots didn't match. I took a screen shot again, and zoomed both images 800% in Paint, and check the pixel next to the "I" in The two different images and sure enough the rgb values are different.
I tried several other places to, and while they looked the same... The rgb values are different by maybe one or two points! I'm curious as to why is this happening!
Use confidence, default value is 0.999. Reason is pyscreeze is actually used by pyautogui which has the confidence value which most likely represents a percentage from 0% - 100% for a similarity match. Looking through the code with my amateur eyes reveals that OpenCV and NumPy are required for confidence to work otherwise a different function would be used that doesn't have the confidence value.
for example:
by doing pyautogui.locateCenterOnScreen('foo.png', confidence=0.5) will set your confidence to 0.5, which means 50%.

Efficient 2D edge detection in Python

I know that this problem has been solved before, but I've been great difficulty finding any literature describing the algorithms used to process this sort of data. I'm essentially doing some edge finding on a set of 2D data. I want to be able to find a couple points on an eye diagram (generally used to qualify high speed communications systems), and as I have had no experience with image processing I am struggling to write efficient methods.
As you can probably see, these diagrams are so called because they resemble the human eye. They can vary a great deal in the thickness, slope, and noise, depending on the signal and the system under test. The measurements that are normally taken are jitter (the horizontal thickness of the crossing region) and eye height (measured at either some specified percentage of the width or the maximum possible point). I know this can best be done with image processing instead of a more linear approach, as my attempts so far take several seconds just to find the left side of the first crossing. Any ideas of how I should go about this in Python? I'm already using NumPy to do some of the processing.
Here's some example data, it is formatted as a 1D array with associated x-axis data. For this particular example, it should be split up every 666 points (2 * int((1.0 / 2.5e9) / 1.2e-12)), since the rate of the signal was 2.5 GB/s, and the time between points was 1.2 ps.
Thanks!
Have you tried OpenCV (Open Computer Vision)? It's widely used and has a Python binding.
Not to be a PITA, but are you sure you wouldn't be better off with a numerical approach? All the tools I've seen for eye-diagram analysis go the numerical route; I haven't seen a single one that analyzes the image itself.
You say your algorithm is painfully slow on that dataset -- my next question would be why. Are you looking at an oversampled dataset? (I'm guessing you are.) And if so, have you tried decimating the signal first? That would at the very least give you fewer samples for your algorithm to wade through.
just going down your route for a moment, if you read those images into memory, as they are, wouldn't it be pretty easy to do two flood fills (starting centre and middle of left edge) that include all "white" data. if the fill routine recorded maximum and minimum height at each column, and maximum horizontal extent, then you have all you need.
in other words, i think you're over-thinking this. edge detection is used in complex "natural" scenes when the edges are unclear. here you edges are so completely obvious that you don't need to enhance them.

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