OCR of low-resolution text from screenshots - python

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.

Related

Eliminate the background (the common points) of 3 images - OpenCV

Forgive me but I'm new in OpenCV.
I would like to delete the common background in 3 images, where there is a landscape and a man.
I tried some subtraction codes but I can't solve the problem.
I would like output each image only with the man and without landscape
Are there in OpenCV Algorithms what do this do? (then without any manual operation so no markers or other)
I tried this python code CV - Extract differences between two images
but not works because in my case i don't have an image with only background (without man).
I thinks that good solution should to Compare all the images and save those "points" that are the same at least in an image.
In this way I can extrapolate a background (which we call "Result.jpg") and finally analyze each image and cut those portions that are also present in "Result.jpg".
You say it's a good idea? Do you have other simplest ideas?
Without semantic segmentation, you can't do that.
Because all you can compute is where two images differ, and this does not give you the silhouette of the person, but an overlapping of two silhouettes. You'll never know the exact outline.

Basic pattern recognition in binary (pixelated) image

Here is a cropped example (about 11x9 pixels) of the kind of images (which ultimately are actually all of size 28x28, but stored in memory flattened as a 784-components array) I will be trying to apply the algorithm on:
Basically, I want to be able to recognize when this shape appears (red lines are used to put emphasis on the separation of the pixels, while the surrounding black border is used to better outline the image against the white background of StackOverflow):
The orientation of it doesn't matter: it must be detected in any of its possible representations (rotations and symmetries) along the horizontal and vertical axis (so, for example, a 45° rotation shouldn't be considered, nor a diagonal symmetry: only consider 90°, 180°, and 270° rotations, for example).
There are two solutions to be found on that image that I first presented, though only one needs to be found (ignore the gray blurr surrounding the white region):
Take this other sample (which also demonstrates that the white figures inside the images aren't always fully surrounded by black pixels):
The function should return True because the shape is present:
Now, there is obviously a simple solution to this:
Use a variable such as pattern = [[1,0,0,0],[1,1,1,1]], produce its variations, and then slide all of the variations along the image until an exact match is found at which point the whole thing just stops and returns True.
This would, however, in the worst case scenario, take up to 8*(28-2)*(28-4)*(2*4) which is approximately 40000 operations for a single image, which seem a bit overkill (if I did my quick calculations right).
I'm guessing one way of making this naive approach better would be to first of all scan the image until I find the very first white pixel, and then start looking for the pattern 4 rows and 4 columns earlier than that point, but even that doesn't seem good enough.
Any ideas? Maybe this kind of function has already been implemented in some library? I'm looking for an implementation or an algorithm that beats my naive approach.
As a side note, while kind of a hack, I'm guessing this is the kind of problem that can be offloaded to the GPU but I do not have much experience with that. While it wouldn't be what I'm looking for primarily, if you provide an answer, feel free to add a GPU-related note.
EDIT:
I ended up making an implementation of the accepted answer. You can see my code in this Gist.
If you have too many operations, think how to do less of them.
For this problem I'd use image integrals.
If you convolve a summing kernel over the image (this is a very fast operation in fft domain with just conv2,imfilter), you know that only locations where the integral is equal to 5 (in your case) are possible pattern matching places. Checking those (even for your 4 rotations) should be computationally very fast. There can not be more than 50 locations in your example image that fit this pattern.
My python is not too fluent, but this is the proof of concept for your first image in MATLAB, I am sure that translating this code should not be a problem.
% get the same image you have (imgur upscaled it and made it RGB)
I=rgb2gray(imread('https://i.stack.imgur.com/l3u4A.png'));
I=imresize(I,[9 11]);
I=double(I>50);
% Integral filter definition (with your desired size)
h=ones(3,4);
% horizontal and vertical filter (because your filter is not square)
Ifiltv=imfilter(I,h);
Ifilth=imfilter(I,h');
% find the locations where integral is exactly the value you want
[xh,yh]=find(Ifilth==5);
[xv,yv]=find(Ifiltv==5);
% this is just plotting, for completeness
figure()
imshow(I,[]);
hold on
plot(yh,xh,'r.');
plot(yv,xv,'r.');
This results in 14 locations to check. My standard computer takes 230ns on average on computing both image integrals, which I would call fast.
Also GPU computing is not a hack :D. Its the way to go with a big bunch of problems because of the enormous computing power they have. E.g. convolutions in GPUs are incredibly fast.
The operation you are implementing is an operator in Mathematical Morphology called hit and miss.
It can be implemented very efficiently as a composition of two erosions. If the shape you’re detecting can be decomposed into a few simple geometrical shapes (especially rectangles are quick to compute) then the operator can be even more efficient.
You’ll find very efficient erosions in most image processing libraries, for example try OpenCV. OpenCV also has a hit and miss operator, here is a tutorial for how to use it.
As an example for what output to expect, I generated a simple test image (left), applied a hit and miss operator with a template that matches at exactly one place in the image (middle), and again with a template that does not match anywhere (right):
I did this in MATLAB, not Python, because I have it open and it's easiest for me to use. This is the code:
se = [1,1,1,1 % Defines the template
0,0,0,1];
img = [0,0,0,0,0,0 % Defines the test image
0,1,1,1,1,0
0,0,0,0,1,0
0,0,0,0,0,0
0,0,0,0,0,0
0,0,0,0,0,0];
img = dip_image(img,'bin');
res1 = hitmiss(img,se);
res2 = hitmiss(img,rot90(se,2));
% Quick-and-dirty display
h = dipshow([img,res1,res2]);
diptruesize(h,'tight',3000)
hold on
plot([5.5,5.5],[-0.5,5.5],'r-')
plot([11.5,11.5],[-0.5,5.5],'r-')
The code above uses the hit and miss operator as I implemented in DIPimage. This same implementation is available in DIPlib's Python bindings as dip.HitAndMiss() (install with pip install diplib):
import diplib as dip
# ...
res = dip.HitAndMiss(img, se)

What is the best way of recognizing handwritten symbols and texts?

I am new to the image processing subject. I'm using opencv library for image processing with python. I need to extract symbols and texts related to those symbols for further work. I saw some of developers have done handwritten text recognitions with Neural network, KNN and other techniques.
My question is what is the best way to extract these symbols and handwritten texts related to them?
Example diagram:
Details I need to extract:
No of Circles in the diagram.
What are the texts inside them.
What are the words within square brackets.
Are they connected with arrows or not.
Of course, there is a method called SWT - Stokes Width Transform.
Please see this paper, if you search it by its name, you can find the codes that some students have written during their school project.
By using this method, text recognitions can be applied. But it is not a days job.
Site: Detecting Text in Natural Scenes with
Stroke Width Transform
Hope that it helps.
For handwritten text recognition, try using TensorFlow. Their website has a simple example for digit recognition (with training data). You can use it to implement your own application for recognizing handwritten alphabets as well. (You'll need to get training data for this though; I used a training data set provided by NIST.)
If you are using OpenCV with python, Hough transform can detect circles in images. You might miss some hand drawn circles, but there are ways to detect ovals and other closed shapes.
For handwritten character recognition, there are lots of libraries available.
Since you are now to this area, I strongly recommend LearnOpenCV and and PyImageSearch to help you familiarize with the algorithms that are available for this kind of tasks.

opencv-python object detection

I'm a beginner in opencv using python. I have many 16 bit gray scale images and need to detect the same object every time in the different images. Tried template matching in opencv python but needed to take different templates for different images which could be not desirable. Can any one suggest me any algorithm in python to do it efficiently.
Your question is way too general. Feature matching is a very vast field.
The type of algorithm to be used totally depends on the object you want to detect, its environment etc.
So if your object won't change its size or angle in the image then use Template Matching.
If the image will change its size and orientation you can use SIFT or SURF.
If your object has unique color features that is different from its background, you can use hsv method.
If you have to classify a group of images as you object,for example all the cricket bats should be detected then you can train a number of positive images to tell the computer how the object looks like and negative image to tell how it doesn't, it can be done using haar training.
u can try out sliding window method. if ur object is the same in all samples
One way to do this is to look for known colors, shapes, and sizes.
You could start by performing an HSV threshold on your image, by converting your image to HSV colorspace and then calling
cv2.inRange(source, (minHue, minSat, minVal), (maxHue, maxSat, maxVal))
Next, you could use cv2.findContours to find all the areas in your image that meet your color requirements. Then, you could use methods such as boundingRect and contourArea to find specific attributes of the object that you want.
What you will end up with is essentially a 'pipeline' that can take a frame, and look for a shape that fits the criteria you have set. Depending on the complexity of what you want to do (you didn't say what you're looking for), this may or may not work, but I have used it with reasonable success.
GRIP is an application that allows you to threshold things in a visual way, and it will also generate Python code for you if you want. I don't really recommend using the generated code as-is because I've run into some problems that way. Here's the link to GRIP: https://github.com/WPIRoboticsProjects/GRIP
If the object you want to detect has different size in every image and also slightly varies in shape too, then I recommend you use HaarCascade of that object. If the object is very general then you can easily find haar cascade for it online. Otherwise it is not very difficult to make haar cascades(can be a littile time consuming though).
You can use this tutorial by sentdex to make HaarCascade here.
Or If you want to know how to use HaarCascades then you can get it on this link
here.

Robust detection of grid pattern in an image

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.

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