Currently I am involved in an image processing project where I am dealing with human faces. But I am facing problems with the images in cases where the light source is on either the left or right side of the face. In those cases, the portion of the image away from the light source is darker. I want to distribute the brightness over the image more evenly, so that the the brightness of darker pixels is increased and the brightness of overly bright pixels is decreased at the same time.
I had used 'gamma correction' techniques to do the same but the results are not desirable , Actually I want to create an output in which the brightness is independent of the light source, in other words , increasing the brightness of the darker part and decreasing the brightness of the brighter part. I am not sure if I reproduced the problem statement correctly but this is a very common problem and I haven't found anything useful abut this on the web.
1. Image with Light source on the right side
2. Image after increasing the brightness of the darker pixels.[img = cv2.pow(img, 0.5)]
3. Image after decreasing the brightness of Bright pixels[img = cv2.pow(img, 2.0)]
I was thinking of taking the mean of both the images 2 and 3 but as we see that the over bright pixels still persist in the image 3 , and I want to get rid of that pixels, Any suggestion ?
In the end I need an image with homogeneous brightness, and independent of the light source.
Take a look at homomorphic filtering applied to image enhancement in which you can selectively filter reflectance and illumination components of an image.
I found this paper: http://www.mirlab.org/conference_papers/International_Conference/ICASSP%202010/pdfs/0001374.pdf i think it exactly addresses the concern you have.
you will need to compute "gradient" of an image i.e. laplacian derivatives for which you can read up on this: http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/doc/py_tutorials/py_imgproc/py_gradients/py_gradients.html
i'd be very interested to know about your implementation. if you run into trouble post a comment here and i can try to help.
Related
I don't know much about image processing so please bear with me if this is not possible to implement.
I have several sets of aerial images of the same area originating from different sources. The pictures have been taken during different seasons, under different lighting conditions etc. Unfortunately some images look patchy and suffer from discolorations or are partially obstructed by clouds or pix-elated, as par example picture1 and picture2
I would like to take as an input several images of the same area and (by some kind of averaging them) produce 1 picture of improved quality. I know some C/C++ so I could use some image processing library.
Can anybody propose any image processing algorithm to achieve it or knows any research done in this field?
I would try with a "color twist" transform, i.e. a 3x3 matrix applied to the RGB components. To implement it, you need to pick color samples in areas that are split by a border, on both sides. You should fing three significantly different reference colors (hence six samples). This will allow you to write the nine linear equations to determine the matrix coefficients.
Then you will correct the altered areas by means of this color twist. As the geometry of these areas is intertwined with the field patches, I don't see a better way than contouring the regions by hand.
In the case of the second picture, the limits of the regions are blurred so that you will need to blur the region mask as well and perform blending.
In any case, don't expect a perfect repair of those problems as the transform might be nonlinear, and completely erasing the edges will be difficult. I also think that colors are so washed out at places that restoring them might create ugly artifacts.
For the sake of illustration, a quick attempt with PhotoShop using manual HLS adjustment (less powerful than color twist).
The first thing I thought of was a kernel matrix of sorts.
Do a first pass of the photo and use an edge detection algorithm to determine the borders between the photos - this should be fairly trivial, however you will need to eliminate any overlap/fading (looks like there's a bit in picture 2), you'll see why in a minute.
Do a second pass right along each border you've detected, and assume that the pixel on either side of the border should be the same color. Determine the difference between the red, green and blue values and average them along the entire length of the line, then divide it by two. The image with the lower red, green or blue value gets this new value added. The one with the higher red, green or blue value gets this value subtracted.
On either side of this line, every pixel should now be the exact same. You can remove one of these rows if you'd like, but if the lines don't run the length of the image this could cause size issues, and the line will likely not be very noticeable.
This could be made far more complicated by generating a filter by passing along this line - I'll leave that to you.
The issue with this could be where there was development/ fall colors etc, this might mess with your algorithm, but there's only one way to find out!
I am making an image processing project which has a few steps and stuck in one of them. Here is the thing; I have segmented an image and subtract the foreground from background. Now, I need to fill the background.
So far, I have tried the inpainting algorithms. They don't work in my case because my background images haven't at least 40% of them. I mean they fail when they are trying the complete 40% of an image. (By the way, these images have given bad results even in the Photoshop with content-aware tool.)
Anyway, I've given up trying inpainting and decided something else. In my project, I don't need to complete 100% of my background. I want to illustrate my solution;
As you see in the image above, I want to pull the image to the black area (which is transparent) with minimum corruption. Any MATLAB code samples, technique, keyword and approach would be great. If you need further explanation, feel free to ask.
I can think of two crude ways to fill the hole:
use roifill: this fills gaps in 2d image preserving image smoothness.
Alteratively, you can use bwdist to compute the nearest neighbor of each black pixel and assign it to its nearest neighbor's color:
[~, nnIdx] = bwdist( bw );
fillImg(bw) = IMG(bw);
although this code snippet works only for gray images, it is quite trivial to extend it to RGB color images.
I want a formula to detect/calculate the change in visible luminosity in a part of the image,provided i can calculate the RGB, HSV, HSL and CMYK color spaces.
E.g: In the above picture we will notice that the left side of the image is more bright when compared to the right side , which is beneath a shade.
I have had a little think about this, and done some experiments in Photoshop, though you could just as well use ImageMagick which is free. Here is what I came up with.
Step 1 - Convert to Lab mode and discard the a and b channels since the Lightness channel holds most of the brightness information which, ultimately, is what we are looking for.
Step 2 - Stretch the contrast of the remaining L channel (using Levels) to accentuate the variation.
Step 3 - Perform a Gaussian blur on the image to remove local, high frequency variations in the image. I think I used 10-15 pixels radius.
Step 4 - Turn on the Histogram window and take a single row marquee and watch the histogram change as different rows are selected.
Step 5 - Look out for a strongly bimodal histogram (two distimct peaks) to identify the illumination variations.
This is not a complete, general purpose solution, but may hold some pointers and cause people who know better to suggest improvememnts for you!!! Note that the method requires the image to have a some areas of high uniformity like the whiteish horizontal bar across your input image. However, nearly any algorithm is going to have a hard time telling the difference between a sheet of white paper with a shadow of uneven light across it and the same sheet of paper with a grey sheet of paper laid on top of it...
In the images below, I have superimposed the histogram top right. In the first one, you can see the histogram is not narrow and bimodal because the dotted horizontal selection marquee is across the bar-code area of the image.
In the subsequent images, you can see a strong bimodal histogram because the dotted selection marquee is across a uniform area of image.
The first problem is in "visible luminosity". It me mean one of several things. This discussion should be a good start. (Yes, it has incomplete and contradictory answers, as well.)
Formula to determine brightness of RGB color
You should make sure you operate on the linear image which does not have any gamma correction applied to it. AFAIK Photoshop does not degamma and regamma images during filtering, which may produce erroneous results. It all depends on how accurate results you want. Photoshop wants things to look good, not be precise.
In principle you should first pick a formula to convert your RGB values to some luminosity value which fits your use. Then you have a single-channel image which you'll need to filter with a Gaussian filter, sliding average, or some other suitable filter. Unfortunately, this may require special tools as photoshop/gimp/etc. type programs tend to cut corners.
But then there is one thing you would probably like to consider. If you have an even brightness gradient across an image, the eye is happy and does not perceive it. Rather large differences go unnoticed if the contrast in the image is constant across the image. Unfortunately, the definition of contrast is not very meaningful if you do not know at least something about the content of the image. (If you have scanned/photographed documents, then the contrast is clearly between ink and paper.) In your sample image the brightness changes quite abruptly, which makes the change visible.
Just to show you how strange the human vision is in determining "brightness", see the classical checker shadow illusion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion
So, my impression is that talking about the conversion formulae is probably the second or third step in the process of finding suitable image processing methods. The first step would be to try to define the problem in more detail. What do you want to accomplish?
i'm interested in some kind of charcoal-filters like the photoshop Photocopy-Filter or the note-paper.
Have someone a paper or some instructions how this filter works?
In best case i want to create the following:
input:
Output:
greetings
I think it's a process akin to pan-sharpening. I could get a quite similar image in gimp by:
Converting to gray
Duplicating into two layers
Lightly blurring one layer
Edge-detecting in the other layer with a DOG filter with large radius
Compositing the two layers, playing a bit with the transparency.
What this is doing is converting the color picture into a 0-1 bitmap picture.
They typically use a threshold function which returns 1 (white) for some values and 0 (black) for some other.
One simple function would be transform the image from color to gray-scale, and then select a shade of gray above which everything is white, and below it everything is black. The actual threshold you use could be made adaptive depending on the brightness of the picture (you want a certain percentage of pixels to be white).
It can also be adaptive based on the context within the picture (i.e. a dark area may still have some white pixels to show local contrast). The trees behind the house are not all black because the filtering is sensitive to the average darkness of the region.
Also note that the area close to the light gap in the tree has a cluster of dark pixels, because of its relative darkness. The edges of the home, the bench are also highlighted. There is an edge detection element at play.
I do not know exactly what effect you gave an example of but there are a variety that are similar to it. As VSOverFlow pointed out, thresholding an image would result in something very similar to that though I do not think it is what is being used. Open cv has a function for this, its documentation can be found here. You may also want to look into Otsu's method for thresholding.
Again as VSOverFlow pointed out, there is an edge detection element at play as well. You may want to investigate the Sobel and Prewitt filters. Those are 3 simple options that will give you something similar to the image you provided. Perhaps you could threshold the result from the Prewitt filter? I have no knowledge of how Photoshop implements its filters. If none of these options are close enough to what you are looking for I would recommend looking for information on the specific implementations of those filters in photoshop.
What is the best (result, not performance) algorithm to fetch dominant colors from an image. The algorithm should discard the background of the image.
I know I can build an array of colors and how many they appear in the image, but I need a way to determine what is the background and what is the foreground, and keep only the second (foreground) in mind while read the dominant colors.
The problem is very hard especially for gradient backgrounds or backrounds with patterns (not plain)
Isolating the foreground from the background is beyond the scope of this particular answer, but...
I've found that applying a pixelation filter to an image will draw out a really good set of 'average' colours.
Before
After
I sometimes use this approach to derive a pallete of colours with a particular mood. I first find a photograph with the general tones I'm after, pixelate and then sample from the resulting image.
(Thanks to Pietro De Grandi for the image, found on unsplash.com)
The colour summarizer is a pretty sweet spot for info on this subject, not to mention their seemingly free XML Web API that will produce descriptive colour statistics for an image of your choosing, reporting back the following formatted with swatches in HTML or as XML...
what is the average color hue, saturation and value in my image?
what is the RGB colour that is most representative of the image?
what do the RGB and HSV histograms look like?
what is the image's human readable colour description (e.g. dark pure blue)?
The purpose of this utility is to generate metadata that summarizes an
image's colour characteristics for inclusion in an image database,
such as Flickr. In particular this tool is being used to generate
metadata for Flickr's Color Fields group.
In my experience though.. this tool still misses the "human-readable" / obvious "main" color, A LOT of the time. Silly machines!
I would say this problem is closer to "impossible" than "very hard". The only approach to it that I can think of would be to make the assumption that the background of an image is likely to consist of solid blocks of similar colors, while the foreground is likely to consist of smaller blocks of dissimilar colors.
If this assumption is generally true, then you could scan through the whole image and weight pixels according to how similar or dissimilar they are to neighboring pixels. In other words, if a pixel's neighbors (within some arbitrary radius, perhaps) were all similar colors, you would not incorporate that pixel into the overall estimate. If the neighbors tend to be very different colors, you would weight the pixel heavily, perhaps in proportion to the degree of difference.
This may not work perfectly, but it would definitely at least tend to exclude large swaths of similar colors.
As far as my knowledge of image processing algorithms extends , there is no certain way to get the "foreground"; it is only possible to get the borders between objects. You'll probably have to make do with an average, or your proposed array count method. In that, you'll want to give colours with higher saturation a higher "score" as they're much more prominent.