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I'm working with a large number of coordinates in a 2D environment. The coordinates model a path.
Here's an example:
path = [(0,0), (1,0), (2,0), (3,0), (3,1), (3,2), (2,2), (1,2), (0,2)]
I want to optimize this path by removing the redundant coordinates. Often times the coordinates move along a straight line on either the X or the Y axis. Therefore, all the points in between the "corner" coordinates could be removed from the path.
This path would be equivalent to the one above:
path = [(0,0), (3,0), (3,2), (0,2)]
Here's an image to describe the desired optimization:
The coordinates will always line up straight on one of the axis. Diagonal lines can be ignored.
It would be great if someone could give me a hint on how to achieve this in an efficient way. I need to run the optimization algorithm many times since the path is procedurally generated.
The Rahmer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm in many cases is suitable to reduce the number of points along a 2D route.
Example in python:
# pip install rdp
from rdp import rdp
path = [[0,0], [1,0], [2,0], [3,0], [3,1], [3,2], [2,2], [1,2], [0,2]]
rdp(path)
# output: [[0, 0], [3, 0], [3, 2], [0, 2]]
rdp project home
So I came up with the following solution: Every time I add a new point to the path, I check if the X or the Y value equals the values of the two previous points. If this is true, I can remove the middle one of the 3 points.
private void RedundancyCheck()
{
if (this.Points.Length < 3)
{
return;
}
var last = this.Points[this.Points.Length-1];
var secondLast = this.Points[this.Points.Length-2];
var thirdLast = this.Points[this.Points.Length-3];
if ( (last.x == secondLast.x && last.x == thirdLast.x)
|| (last.y == secondLast.y && last.y == thirdLast.y) )
{
RemovePoint(this.Points.Length-2);
}
}
This algorithm seems to run quite fast and I was able to reduce the amount of coordinates from ~450'000 to ~3300. (of course this depends on the coordinates)
If I have the coordinates of the points on the outline of an arbitrary 2D shape, how can I find the coordinates of points composing the outline of a stair step curve, which best represents the original outline, but only use a set of known coordinates (xi, i=1,...,n and yi, i=1,...,m). For example the original triangle is represented by the thick solid blue line. it's different from the matlab stairs function, if my understanding is correct.
matlab code will be nice, but in other language is also ok, algorithm is most important.Thanks.
I'll start by defining a set of sample data based on your plot. Assuming that the pixel centers are aligned at integer values (the convention MATLAB follows) and that the lower left corner is at (0.5, 0.5), here's the data we get:
vx = [1.5; 9.7; 3.7; 1.5]; % X values of triangle vertices
vy = [8.3; 6.0; 1.7; 8.3]; % Y values of triangle vertices
x = 1:10; % X pixel center coordinates
y = 1:9; % Y pixel center coordinates
Note that the vertex coordinates are ordered starting at the top left corner of the triangle and proceeding clockwise, repeating the first vertex at the end to close the polygon.
Getting the mask (the easy part):
There is an easy way to compute the dark gray mask if you have the Image Processing Toolbox: use poly2mask:
mask = poly2mask(vx, vy, numel(y), numel(x));
The algorithm this function uses is discussed here. However, if you'd like to use a pure MATLAB approach that requires no special toolboxes, you can use inpolygon instead:
[cx, cy] = meshgrid(x, y); % Generate a grid of x and y values
mask = inpolygon(cx, cy, vx, vy);
In this case, a pixel is included in the mask as long as its center point lies within the polygon. In this particular example these two approaches yield the same resulting mask, but they won't always due to the differences in their criteria for deciding if a pixel is included or not.
Getting the outline coordinates:
It's a little more involved to get the coordinates of the mask outline, ordered appropriately around the perimeter. To accomplish this, we can represent the mask as a series of vertices and triangular facets (using the triangulation function), then compute the free boundary (i.e. edges that are only present on one triangular facet):
% Create raw triangulation data:
[cx, cy] = meshgrid(x, y);
xTri = bsxfun(#plus, [0; 1; 1; 0], cx(mask).');
yTri = bsxfun(#plus, [0; 0; 1; 1], cy(mask).');
V = [xTri(:) yTri(:)];
F = reshape(bsxfun(#plus, [1; 2; 3; 1; 3; 4], 0:4:(4*nnz(mask)-4)), 3, []).';
% Trim triangulation data:
[V, ~, Vindex] = unique(V, 'rows');
V = V-0.5;
F = Vindex(F);
% Create triangulation and find free edge coordinates:
TR = triangulation(F, V);
freeEdges = freeBoundary(TR).';
xOutline = V(freeEdges(1, [1:end 1]), 1); % Ordered edge x coordinates
yOutline = V(freeEdges(1, [1:end 1]), 2); % Ordered edge y coordinates
And we can plot this like so:
imagesc(x, y, mask);
axis equal
set(gca, 'XLim', [min(x)-0.5 max(x)+0.5], ...
'YLim', [min(y)-0.5 max(y)+0.5], ...
'XTick', x, 'YTick', y, 'YDir', 'normal');
colormap([0.9 0.9 0.9; 0.6 0.6 0.6]);
hold on;
plot(xOutline, yOutline, 'b', 'LineWidth', 2);
plot(xOutline(1), yOutline(1), 'go', 'LineWidth', 2);
plot(vx, vy, 'r', 'LineWidth', 2);
The outline coordinates in xOutline and yOutline are ordered starting from the green circle going counter-clockwise around the mask region.
Seems you need any line rasterization algorithm (that gives coordinate of integer grid points approximating line segment).
Consider Bresenham algortihm or DDA one.
My problem is as follows:
I have the picture of a half cylinder taken from a horizontal perspective and it has square grid lines on it, so I was wondering how can I implement in MATLAB to unwrap this half cylinder so all my grid cells become the same size? I know I will loose lots of resolution in the edge cells and a simple linear interpolation should do the trick, but I do not know how to tell MATLAB to do this. Also I know the geometrical properties of the cylinder, radius and height. Any help is greatly appreciated.
This is the approach I am using, but I am trying to find the transformation that will make the edges be same size as inner cells.
im=imread('Capture.png');
imshow(im);
impixelinfo
r = #(x) sqrt(x(:,1).^2 + x(:,2).^2);
w = #(x) atan2(x(:,2), x(:,1));
f = #(x) [sqrt(r(x)) .* cos(w(x)), sqrt(r(x)) .* sin(w(x))];
g = #(x, unused) f(x);
tform2 = maketform('custom', 2, 2, [], g, []);
im3 = imtransform(im, tform2, 'UData', [-1 1], 'VData', [-1 1], ...
'XData', [-1 1], 'YData', [-1 1]);
figure,
imshow(im3)
I think the transformation is much simpler than what you're trying to do. Take a look at the (forward) transformation to take a flat grid and wrap it around a cylinder. The coordinates along the axis of the cylinder (the y coordinates, in this case) are unchanged. If we take the range of the grid coordinates in the x direction to be [-1,1], the coordinates on the cylinder will be:
sin(x × π/2)
Since this is the forward transformation going from a grid to the cylinder, it is also the inverse transformation going from the cylinder to the grid.
f = #(x, unused) [sin(x (:, 1) * pi / 2), x(:, 2)]
tform2 = maketform('custom', 2, 2, [], f, []);
im3=imtransform(img, tform2, 'UData', [-1 1], 'VData', [-1 1], ...
'XData', [-1 1], 'YData', [-1 1]);
Result:
This still isn't perfect, primarily because the original image has borders around it that we're transforming along with the rest of the image. This could be improved by cropping the image to contain only the cylinder portion.
Here is the deal. I have multiple points (X,Y) that form an 'ellipse like' shape.
I would like to evaluate/fit the 'best' ellipse possible and get its properties (a,b,F1,F2), or just the center of the ellipse.
Any ideas/leads would be appreciated.
Gilad.
There's a Matlab function fit_ellipse that can do the job. There's also this paper on methods for orthogonal distance fitting of ellipses. A web search for orthogonal ellipse fit will probably turn up a lot of other resources as well.
The ellipse fitting method proposed by:
Z. L. Szpak, W. Chojnacki, and A. van den Hengel.
Guaranteed ellipse fitting with a confidence region and an uncertainty measure for centre, axes, and orientation.
J. Math. Imaging Vision, 2015.
may be of interest to you. They provide estimates of both algebraic and geometric ellipse
parameters, together with covariance matrices that express the uncertainty of the parameter estimates.
They also provide a means of computing a planar 95% confidence region associated with the estimate
that allows one to visualise the uncertainty in the ellipse fit.
A pre-print version of the paper is available on the authors websites (http://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~wojtek/publicationsWC.html).
A MATLAB implementation of the method is also available for download:
https://sites.google.com/site/szpakz/source-code/guaranteed-ellipse-fitting-with-a-confidence-region-and-an-uncertainty-measure-for-centre-axes-and-orientation
I will explain how I would approach the problem. I would suggest a hill climbing approach. First compute the gravity center of the points as a start point and choose two values for a and b in some way(probably arbitrary positive values will do). You need to have a fit function and I would suggest it to return the number of points (close enough to)lying on a given ellipse:
int fit(x, y, a, b)
int res := 0
for point in points
if point_almost_on_ellipse(x, y, a, b, point)
res = res + 1
end_if
end_for
return res
Now start with some step. I would choose a big enough value to be sure the best center of the elipse will never be more then step away from the first point. Choosing such a big value is not necessary, but the slowest part of the algorithm is the time it takes to get close to the best center so bigger value is better, I think.
So now we have some initial point(x, y), some initial values of a and b and an initial step. The algorithm iteratively chooses the best of the neighbours of the current point if there is any neighbour better then it, or decrease step twice otherwise. Here by 'best' I mean using the fit function. And also a position is defined by four values (x, y, a, b) and it's neighbours are 8: (x+-step, y, a, b),(x, y+-step, a, b), (x, y, a+-step, b), (x, y, a, b+-step)(if results are not good enough you can add more neighbours by also going by diagonal - for instance (x+-step, y+-step, a, b) and so on). Here is how you do that
neighbours = [[-1, 0, 0, 0], [1, 0, 0, 0], [0, -1, 0, 0], [0, 1, 0, 0],
[0, 0, -1, 0], [0, 0, 1, 0], [0, 0, 0, -1], [0, 0, 0, 1]]
iterate (cx, cy, ca, cb, step)
current_fit = fit(cx, cy, ca, cb)
best_neighbour = []
best_fit = current_fit
for neighbour in neighbours
tx = cx + neighbour[0]*step
ty = cx + neighbour[1]*step
ta = ca + neighbour[2]*step
tb = cb + neighbour[3]*step
tfit = fit(tx, ty, ta, tb)
if (tfit > best_fit)
best_fit = tfit
best_neighbour = [tx,ty,ta,tb]
endif
end_for
if best_neighbour.size == 4
cx := best_neighbour[0]
cy := best_neighbour[1]
ca := best_neighbour[2]
cb := best_neighbour[3]
else
step = step * 0.5
end_if
And you continue iterating until the value of step is smaller then a given threshold(for instance 1e-6). I have written everything in pseudo code as I am not sure which language do you want to use.
It is not guaranteed that the answer found this way will be optimal but I am pretty sure it will be good enough approximation.
Here is an article about hill climbing.
I think that Wild Magic library contains a function for ellipse fitting. There is article with method decription
The problem is to define "best". What is best in your case? The ellipse with the smallest area which contains n% of pointS?
If you define "best" in terms of probability, you can simply use the covariance matrix of your points, and compute the error ellipse.
An error ellipse for this "multivariate Gaussian distribution" would then contain the points corresponding to whatever confidence interval you decide.
Many computing packages can compute the covariance, with its corresponding eigenvalues and eigenvectors. The angle of the ellipse is the angle between the x axis and the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue. The semi-axes are the reciprocal of the eigenvalues.
If your routine returns everything normalized (which it should), then you can decide by what factor to multiply everything to obtain an alpha-confidence interval.
For this problem speed is pretty crucial. I've drawn a nice image to explain the problem better. The algorithm needs to calculate if edges of a rectangle continue within the confines of the canvas, will the edge intersect another rectangle?
We know:
The size of the canvas
The size of each rectangle
The position of each rectangle
The faster the solution is the better! I'm pretty stuck on this one and don't really know where to start.
alt text http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/8a457f2925.gif
Cheers
Just create the set of intervals for each of the X and the Y axis. Then for each new rectangle, see if there are intersecting intervals in the X or the Y axis. See here for one way of implementing the interval sets.
In your first example, the interval set on the horizontal axis would be { [0-8], [0-8], [9-10] }, and on the vertical: { [0-3], [4-6], [0-4] }
This is only a sketch, I abstracted many details here (e.g. usually one would ask an interval set/tree "which intervals overlap this one", instead of "intersect this one", but nothing not doable).
Edit
Please watch this related MIT lecture (it's a bit long, but absolutely worths it).
Even if you find simpler solutions (than implementing an augmented red-black tree), it's good to know the ideas behind these things.
Lines that are not parallel to each other are going to intersect at some point. Calculate the slopes of each line and then determine what lines they won't intersect with.
Start with that, and then let's see how to optimize it. I'm not sure how your data is represented and I can't see your image.
Using slopes is a simple equality check which probably means you can take advantage of sorting the data. In fact, you can probably just create a set of distinct slopes. You'll have to figure out how to represent the data such that the two slopes of the same rectangle are not counted as intersecting.
EDIT: Wait.. how can two rectangles whose edges go to infinity not intersect? Rectangles are basically two lines that are perpendicular to each other. shouldn't that mean it always intersects with another if those lines are extended to infinity?
as long as you didn't mention the language you chose to solve the problem, i will use some kind of pseudo code
the idea is that if everything is ok, then a sorted collection of rectangle edges along one axis should be a sequence of non-overlapping intervals.
number all your rectangles, assigning them individual ids
create an empty binary tree collection (btc). this collection should have a method to insert an integer node with info btc::insert(key, value)
for all rectangles, do:
foreach rect in rects do
btc.insert(rect.top, rect.id)
btc.insert(rect.bottom, rect.id)
now iterate through the btc (this will give you a sorted order)
btc_item = btc.first()
do
id = btc_item.id
btc_item = btc.next()
if(id != btc_item.id)
then report_invalid_placement(id, btc_item.id)
btc_item = btc.next()
while btc_item is valid
5,7,8 - repeat steps 2,3,4 for rect.left and rect.right coordinates
I like this question. Here is my try to get on it:
If possible:
Create a polygon from each rectangle. Treat each edge as an line of maximum length that must be clipped. Use a clipping algorithm to check weather or not a line intersects with another. For example this one: Line Clipping
But keep in mind: If you find an intersection which is at the vertex position, its a valid one.
Here's an idea. Instead of creating each rectangle with (x, y, width, height), instantiate them with (x1, y1, x2, y2), or at least have it interpret these values given the width and height.
That way, you can check which rectangles have a similar x or y value and make sure the corresponding rectangle has the same secondary value.
Example:
The rectangles you have given have the following values:
Square 1: [0, 0, 8, 3]
Square 3: [0, 4, 8, 6]
Square 4: [9, 0, 10, 4]
First, we compare Square 1 to Square 3 (no collision):
Compare the x values
[0, 8] to [0, 8] These are exactly the same, so there's no crossover.
Compare the y values
[0, 4] to [3, 6] None of these numbers are similar, so they're not a factor
Next, we compare Square 3 to Square 4 (collision):
Compare the x values
[0, 8] to [9, 10] None of these numbers are similar, so they're not a factor
Compare the y values
[4, 6] to [0, 4] The rectangles have the number 4 in common, but 0 != 6, therefore, there is a collision
By know we know that a collision will occur, so the method will end, but lets evaluate Square 1 and Square 4 for some extra clarity.
Compare the x values
[0, 8] to [9, 10] None of these numbers are similar, so they're not a factor
Compare the y values
[0, 3] to [0, 4] The rectangles have the number 0 in common, but 3 != 4, therefore, there is a collision
Let me know if you need any extra details :)
Heh, taking the overlapping intervals answer to the extreme, you simply determine all distinct intervals along the x and y axis. For each cutting line, do an upper bound search along the axis it will cut based on the interval's starting value. If you don't find an interval or the interval does not intersect the line, then it's a valid line.
The slightly tricky part is to realize that valid cutting lines will not intersect a rectangle's bounds along an axis, so you can combine overlapping intervals into a single interval. You end up with a simple sorted array (which you fill in O(n) time) and a O(log n) search for each cutting line.