Save a figure to file with specific resolution - image

In an old version of my code, I used to do a hardcopy() with a given resolution, ie:
frame = hardcopy(figHandle, ['-d' renderer], ['-r' num2str(round(pixelsperinch))]);
For reference, hardcopy saves a figure window to file.
Then I would typically perform:
ZZ = rgb2gray(frame) < 255/2;
se = strel('disk',diskSize);
ZZ2 = imdilate(ZZ,se); %perform dilation.
Surface = bwarea(ZZ2); %get estimated surface (in pixels)
This worked until I switched to Matlab 2017, in which the hardcopy() function is deprecated and we are left with the print() function instead.
I am unable to extract the data from figure handler at a specific resolution using print. I've tried many things, including:
frame = print(figHandle, '-opengl', strcat('-r',num2str(round(pixelsperinch))));
But it doesn't work. How can I overcome this?
EDIT
I don't want to 'save' nor create a figure file, my aim is to extract the data from the figure in order to mesure a surface after a dilation process. I just want to keep this information and since 'im processing a LOT of different trajectories (total is approx. 1e7 trajectories), i don't want to save each file to disk (this is costly, time execution speaking). I'm running this code on a remote server (without a graphic card).
The issue I'm struggling with is: "One or more output arguments not assigned during call to "varargout"."
getframe() does not allow for setting a specific resolution (it uses current resolution instead as far as I know)
EDIT2
Ok, figured out how to do, you need to pass the '-RGBImage' argument like this:
frame = print(figHandle, ['-' renderer], ['-r' num2str(round(pixelsperinch))], '-RGBImage');
it also accept custom resolution and renderer as specified in the documentation.

I think you must specify formattype too (-dtiff in my case). I've tried this in Matlab 2016b with no problem:
print(figHandle,'-dtiff', '-opengl', '-r600', 'nameofmyfig');
EDIT:
If you need the CData just find the handle of the corresponding axes and get its CData
f = findobj('Tag','mytag')
Then depending on your matlab version use:
mycdata = get(f,'CData');
or directly
mycdta = f.CData;
EDIT 2:
You can set the tag of your image programatically and then do what I said previously:
a = imshow('peppers.png');
set(a,'Tag','mytag');

Related

Configure larger limit of columns on Format module

The Format module
The Format module is used to model and combine pretty printers with a syntactic extension that allows typed formats and it helps a lot when you are writing something like a code generator or a data structure printer.
The problem
However, there is a limit of 78 columns that is initialized on the margin of the formatter and will pull to the left anything that takes more than this limit.
I'm printing a lighter version of a Yojson.Basic.json program using the Format module, but when the input is too large, the output is collapsed, and that is not really "prettily".
Preview
Here is how it is is formatted when it is short:
Here is how it is formatted when the indentation becomes too large
I've been trying to exceed and configure this limit to 120 columns, but didn't have any success.
What have I tried?
Using Format.pp_set_margin ppf 120 to reconfigure
Using Format.pp_set_max_indent to a larger value
But they doesn't seem to have any effect and there is no documentation easily available about this limit. I've discovered it only by reading the source code.
What am I doing?
let string_of_cst program =
let ppf = Format.str_formatter in
(* I've enabled colors. *)
Format.pp_set_tags ppf colors;
Format.pp_set_formatter_tag_functions ppf with_colors;
(* [print_json] is my printer. *)
print_json ppf program;
(* Get string out of printer. *)
Format.flush_str_formatter ()
How can I configure a larger limit?
The issue is that the values for margin and max_indent are implicitly constrained to the cone 1 < max_indent < margin and the function set_max_indent silently fails and does nothing if this constraint is not respected.
To avoid this issue, in OCaml ≥4.08, it would be possible to use the new set_geometry function that requires to set both value simultaneously and fails with an exception if the required max_indent is greater than the margin.
Otherwise, you should always set both values at the same time, and always in the order
margin first, and max_indent second. If you don't know which value to chose for max_indent, margin - 10 is generally an alright choice.

Cropping very large fits files using specified boundaries

I have a large fits file (over 30,000 x 30,000) pixels. IRAF cannot handle this size of image. How can one crop a file of this size while retaining correct header information, as IRAF does when using its standard cropping mode?
You can do this sort of cropping with astropy.io.fits, though it's not trivial yet. Since astropy.io.fits uses memory mapping by default, it should be able to handle arbitrarily large files (within some practical limits). If you want non-python solutions, look here for details about postage stamp creation.
from astropy.io import fits
from astropy import wcs
f = fits.open('file.fits')
w = wcs.WCS(f[0].header)
newf = fits.PrimaryHDU()
newf.data = f[0].data[100:-100,100:-100]
newf.header = f[0].header
newf.header.update(w[100:-100,100:-100].to_header())
See also this pull request, which implements a convenience Cutout2D function, though this is not yet available in a released version of astropy. Its usage can be seen in the documentation, modified to include WCS:
from astropy.nddata import Cutout2D
position = (49.7, 100.1)
shape = (40, 50)
cutout = Cutout2D(f[0].data, position, shape, wcs=w)
There are more examples here

MATLAB ConnectedComponentLabeler does not work in for loop

I am trying to get a set of binary images' eccentricity and solidity values using the regionprops function. I obtain the label matrix using the vision.ConnectedComponentLabeler function.
This is the code I have so far:
files = getFiles('images');
ecc = zeros(length(files)); %eccentricity values
sol = zeros(length(files)); %solidity values
ccl = vision.ConnectedComponentLabeler;
for i=1:length(files)
I = imread(files{i});
[L NUM] = step(ccl, I);
for j=1:NUM
L = changem(L==j, 1, j); %*
end
stats = regionprops(L, 'all');
ecc(i) = stats.Eccentricity;
sol(i) = stats.Solidity;
end
However, when I run this, I get an error says indicating the line marked with *:
Error using ConnectedComponentLabeler/step
Variable-size input signals are not supported when the OutputDataType property is set to 'Automatic'.'
I do not understand what MATLAB is talking about and I do not have any idea about how to get rid of it.
Edit
I have returned back to bwlabel function and have no problems now.
The error is a bit hard to understand, but I can explain what exactly it means. When you use the CVST Connected Components Labeller, it assumes that all of your images that you're going to use with the function are all the same size. That error happens because it looks like the images aren't... hence the notion about "Variable-size input signals".
The "Automatic" property means that the output data type of the images are automatic, meaning that you don't have to worry about whether the data type of the output is uint8, uint16, etc. If you want to remove this error, you need to manually set the output data type of the images produced by this labeller, or the OutputDataType property to be static. Hopefully, the images in the directory you're reading are all the same data type, so override this field to be a data type that this function accepts. The available types are uint8, uint16 and uint32. Therefore, assuming your images were uint8 for example, do this before you run your loop:
ccl = vision.ConnectedComponentLabeler;
ccl.OutputDataType = 'uint8';
Now run your code, and it should work. Bear in mind that the input needs to be logical for this to have any meaningful output.
Minor comment
Why are you using the CVST Connected Component Labeller when the Image Processing Toolbox bwlabel function works exactly the same way? As you are using regionprops, you have access to the Image Processing Toolbox, so this should be available to you. It's much simpler to use and requires no setup: http://www.mathworks.com/help/images/ref/bwlabel.html

Creating animation with multiple plots in Octave

I'm using Octave to write a script that plots a function at different time periods. I was hoping to create an animation of the plots in order to see the changes through time.
Is there a way to save each plot for each time point, so that all plots can be combined to create this animation?
It's a bit of kludge, but you can do the following (works here with octave 4.0.0-rc2):
x = (-5:.1:5);
for p = 1:5
plot (x, x.^p)
print animation.pdf -append
endfor
im = imread ("animation.pdf", "Index", "all");
imwrite (im, "animation.gif", "DelayTime", .5)
Basically, print all your plots into a pdf, one per page. Then read the pdf's as images and print them back as gifs. This will not work on Matlab (its imread implementation can't handle pdf).
This creates an animated gif
data=rand(100,100,20); %100 by 100 and 20 frames
%data go from 0 to 1, so lets convert to 8 bit unsigned integers for saving
data=data*2^8;
data=uint8(data);
%Write the first frame to a file named animGif.gif
imwrite(data(:,:,1),'/tmp/animGif.gif','gif','writemode','overwrite',...
'LoopCount',inf,'DelayTime',0);
%Loop through and write the rest of the frames
for ii=2:size(data,3)
imwrite(data(:,:,ii),'/tmp/animGif.gif','gif','writemode','append','DelayTime',0)
end
Had to come chime in here because this was the top Google result for me when I was looking for help with this. I had issues with both answers, and some other issues, too. Notably:
For Rick T's answer, the code snippet doesn't write a plot figure, it just writes matrix data. Getting the plot window was a pain.
For carandraug's answer, writing to a PDF took a very long time and made a gigantic PDF.
On my own machine, I'm pretty sure I used apt-install to get Octave, but the getframe function I found referenced in other answers wasn't found. Turns out I had installed version 4.4, which was from 2018 (>3 years old).
I removed the old version of Octave sudo apt remove octave, then installed the new version with snap. If you try octave from a terminal without it installed it should prompt you to the snap install - be sure to include the # 6.4.0 or whatever is included in the command.
Once I had the current version installed, I got access to the getframe command, which is what lets you convert directly from a figure handle to image data - this bypasses the hackey (but previously necessary step) in #carandraug's answer where you had to write to PDF or some other image as a placeholder.
I used #RickT's answer to make my own MakeGif function, which I will share with you all here. Note that MakeGif stores the filename in a persistent variable, meaning it is retained across calls. If you change the filename it will make (or overwrite!!) the new file. If you need to overwrite the current file (i.e., running the same script multiple times and want new results) then you can use clear MakeGif between calls and that will reset the persistentFilename.
Here is the code for the MakeGif function; code to test it with is provided after this:
function MakeGif(figHandle, filename)
persistent persistentFilename = [];
if isempty(filename)
error('Can''t have an empty filename!');
endif
if ~ishandle(figHandle)
error('Call MakeGif(figHandle, filename); no valid figHandle was passed!');
endif
writeMode = 'Append';
if isempty(persistentFilename)|(filename!=persistentFilename)
persistentFilename = filename;
writeMode = 'Overwrite';
endif
imstruct = getframe(figHandle);
imwrite(imstruct.cdata, filename, 'gif', 'WriteMode',writeMode,'DelayTime',0);
endfunction
And here is the code to test the function. There's a commented-out call to clear MakeGif between the blue and green colors. If you leave it commented out it will append the green sine wave to the blue sine wave, resulting in alternating colors after every cycle - again the filename is persistent in the function. If you uncomment that call then the MakeGif function will treat the green's call as "new" and trigger the overwrite of the blue sine wave and all you'll see is green.
clear all;
time = 0:0.1:2*pi;
nSamples = numel(time);
figHandle = figure(1);
for i=1:nSamples
plot(time,sin(time + time(i)),'Color','blue');
drawnow;
MakeGif(figHandle, 'test.gif');
endfor
% Uncomment the 'clear' command below to clear the MakeGif persistent
% memory, which will trigger the green sine wave to overwrite the blue.
% Default behavior is to APPEND a green sine wave because the filename
% is the same.
%clear MakeGif;
for i=1:nSamples
plot(time,sin(time + time(i)),'Color','green');
drawnow;
MakeGif(figHandle, 'test.gif');
endfor
I spent several hours on this after being super dissatisfied with laggy screen captures so I really hope this helps someone in the future! Good luck and best wishes from the Age of Covid lol.
#Chuck thanks for that code; I've been using it to save 1500-frame GIFs of simulation output, and I find that after maybe ~500 frames the time to save the next frame to the output during the call to MakeGif starts to become ... unnerving. I guess imwrite reads and writes the entirety of the output file at each call that includes the 'WriteMode','Append' pair. At frame 1500 my output is 480Mb so that becomes untenable.
An apparent rescue for this is hinted at in the doc for Octave 7.1.0's imwrite, with the suggestion that you can pass it a 4-dimensional array and write the entire image sequence with one call. I haven't been able to make this work, though: Calling imwrite that way seems to simply write the very first image in the sequence into every frame in the output file.

Opencv cvSaveImage

I am trying to save an image using opencv cvSaveImage function. The problem is that I am performing a DCT on the image and then changing the coefficients that are obtained after performing the DCT, after that I am performing an inverse DCT to get back the pixel values. But this time I get the pixel values in Decimals(e.g. 254.34576). So when I save this using cvSaveImage function it discards all the values after decimals(e.g. saving 254.34576 as 254) and saves the image. Due to this my result gets affected. Please Help
"The function cvSaveImage saves the image to the specified file. The image format is chosen depending on the filename extension, see cvLoadImage. Only 8-bit single-channel or 3-channel (with 'BGR' channel order) images can be saved using this function. If the format, depth or channel order is different, use cvCvtScale and cvCvtColor to convert it before saving, or use universal cvSave to save the image to XML or YAML format."
I'd suggest investigating the cvSave function.
HOWEVER, a much easier way is to just write your own save/load functions, this would be very easy:
f = fopen("image.dat","wb");
fprintf(f,"%d%d",width,height);
for (y=0 to height)
for (x=0 to width)
fprintf(f,"%f",pixelAt(x,y));
And a corresponding mirror function for reading.
P.S. Early morning and I can't remember for the life of me if fprintf works with binary files. But you get the idea. You could use fwrite() instead.

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