I am new to sketch and I am facing some issues in generating Vectors for some of the icons which I have in .png format.
Could any one please refer some tutorial or tell me some simple way to get through this.
Feel free to guide me if I am wrong somewhere.
Thanks
Sketch is very useful but it is also limited on its vector capabilities. The function you are looking for is called Live Tracing, you can find it on Illustrator and it is very acurate if your icon is in high contrast or transparent background. You could trace it manually but that can take a long time for complex shapes, and not as accurate.
Inkscape might be a good free option for this. Should be good enough if the pngs are not too detailed.
Himanshu,
I also faced same issues but I think there is no such easy way to get out of this using Sketch.
but still, you can review this basic Youtube tutorial for the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT8pDVrYtY
Hope this helps you out buddy.
Happy designing.
First of all, thanks for reading my question. I'm beginner in computer vision.
I read a lot but I didn't find any solution.
I have an image and I want to detect logo/logos on it.
Also, I have a whole of images with different logos, all image containing a logo on it and nothing more.
Can you help me with any idea of how to detect logo/logos on an image when I have a whole (thousands) of training sets (known logos set)?
It can be done by using the SURF or SIFT feature detection algorithm for few known logos, by matching the given image with all of the others but I have a huge dataset, and I can't match with all other images.
To try all images in the dataset takes toooooo much time :)
Can be useful any SDK? (it can be even for mobile phones or for desktop also).
Or can I use some multiple algorithms for it?
I found an interesting paper about this question with a SIGMA algorithm, but I can't find any description for these algorithms (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=5495345).
I think to detect the features on the images is OK (SIFT, maybe SURF).
But I think the problem is with the big number of known images/logos.
I think it should be stored in a special way.
Ex. made a tree somehow from the thousand of known logos, or to separate them in groups.
Is it possible to do this task?
I appreciate any help.
The thousands of training sets is useful only to test your algorithm, it will not help to analyze a new image.
I made a bit of pattern recognition in the past, I would start this way: look for sharp edges (sharp color transitions too). So an edge filter and statistical analysis about features all located in the same corner. The result of the algorithm will be a number that you will use with your training set.
Since you are doing original reserch be prepared for a long work. If a SDK with a function "ImageHasLogo()" exists yet, you will find it on Google.
Say i have this old manuscript ..What am trying to do is making the manuscript such that all the characters present in it can be perfectly recognized what are the things i should keep in mind ?
While approaching such a problem any methods for the same?
Please help thank you
Some graphics applications have macro recorders (e.g. Paint Shop Pro). They can record a sequence of operations applied to an image and store them as macro script. You can then run the macro in a batch process, in order to process all the images contained in a folder automatically. This might be a better option, than re-inventing the wheel.
I would start by playing around with the different functions manually, in order to see what they do to your image. There are an awful number of things you can try: Sharpening, smoothing and remove noise with a lot of different methods and options. You can work on the contrast in many different ways (stretch, gamma correction, expand, and so on).
In addition, if your image has a yellowish background, then working on the red or green channel alone would probably lead to better results, because then the blue channel has a bad contrast.
Do you mean that you want to make it easier for people to read the characters, or are you trying to improve image quality so that optical character recognition (OCR) software can read them?
I'd recommend that you select a specific goal for readability. For example, you might want readers to be able to read the text 20% faster if the image has been processed. If you're using OCR software to read the text, set a read rate you'd like to achieve. Having a concrete goal makes it easier to keep track of your progress.
The image processing book Digital Image Processing by Gonzalez and Woods (3rd edition) has a nice example showing how to convert an image like this to a black-on-white representation. Once you have black text on a white background, you can perform a few additional image processing steps to "clean up" the image and make it a little more readable.
Sample steps:
Convert the image to black and white (grayscale)
Apply a moving average threshold to the image. If the characters are usually about the same size in an image, then you shouldn't have much trouble selecting values for the two parameters of the moving average threshold algorithm.
Once the image has been converted to just black characters on a white background, try simple operations such as morphological "close" to fill in small gaps.
Present the original image and the cleaned image to adult readers, and time how long it takes for them to read each sample. This will give you some indication of the improvement in image quality.
A technique call Stroke Width Transform has been discussed on SO previously. It can be used to extract character strokes from even very complex backgrounds. The SWT would be harder to implement, but could work for quite a wide variety of images:
Stroke Width Transform (SWT) implementation (Java, C#...)
The texture in the paper could present a problem for many algorithms. However, there are technique for denoising images based on the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), an algorithm that you can use to find 1D or 2D sinusoidal patterns in an image (e.g. grid patterns). About halfway down the following page you can see examples of FFT-based techniques for removing periodic noise:
http://www.fmwconcepts.com/misc_tests/FFT_tests/index.html
If you find a technique that works for the images you're testing, I'm sure a number of people would be interested to see the unprocessed and processed images.
In the upcoming version of Photoshop there is a feature called Content-Aware fill.
This feature will fill a selection of an image based on the surrounding image - to the point it can generate bushes and clouds while being seamless with the surrounding image.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI for a preview of the Photoshop feature I'm talking about.
My question is:
How does this feature work algorithmically?
I am a co-author of the PatchMatch paper previously mentioned here, and I led the development of the original Content-Aware Fill feature in Photoshop, along with Ivan Cavero Belaunde and Eli Shechtman in the Creative Technologies Lab, and Jeff Chien on the Photoshop team.
Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill uses a highly optimized, multithreaded variation of the algorithm described in the PatchMatch paper, and an older method called "SpaceTime Video Completion." Both papers are cited on the following technology page for this feature:
http://www.adobe.com/technology/projects/content-aware-fill.html
You can find out more about us on the Adobe Research web pages.
I'm guessing that for the smaller holes they are grabbing similarly textured patches surrounding the area to fill it in. This is described in a paper entitled "PatchMatch: A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing" by Connelly Barnes and others in SIGGRAPH 2009. For larger holes they can exploit a large database of pictures with similar global statistics or texture, as describe in "Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs". If they somehow could fused the two together I think it should work like in the video.
There is very similar algorithm for GIMP for a quite long time. It is called resynthesizer and probably you should be able to find a source for it (maybe at the project site)
EDIT
There is also source available at the ubuntu repository
And here you can see processing the same images with GIMP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AoobQQBeVc&feature=related
Well, they are not going to tell for the obvious reasons. The general name for the technique is "inpainting", you can look this up.
Specifically, if you look at what Criminisi did while in Microsoft http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.67.9407 and what Todor Georgiev does now at Adobe http://www.tgeorgiev.net/Inpainting.html, you'll be able to make a very good guess. A 90% guess, I'd say, which should be good enough.
I work on a similar problem. From what i read they use "PatchMatch" or "non-parametric patch sampling" in general.
PatchMatch: A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm
for Structural Image Editing
As a guess (and that's all that it would be) I'd expect that it does some frequency analysis (some like a Fourier transform) of the image. By looking only at the image at the edge of the selection and ignoring the middle, it could then extrapolate back into the middle. If the designers choose the correct color plains and what not, they should be able to generate a texture that seamlessly blends into the image at the edges.
edit: looking at the last example in the video; if you look at the top of the original image on either edge you see that the selection line runs right down a "gap" in the clouds and that right in the middle there is a "bump". These are the kind of artifacts I'd expect to see if my guess is correct. (OTOH, I'd also expect to see them is it was using some kind of sudo-mirroring across the selection boundary.)
The general approach is either content-aware fill or seam-carving. Ariel Shamir's group is responsible for the seminal work here, which was presented in SIGGRAPH 2007. See:
http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/site/subject-seam-carve.asp
Edit: Please see answer from the co-author of Content-Aware fill. I will be deleting this soon.
I am building a web application using .NET 3.5 (ASP.NET, SQL Server, C#, WCF, WF, etc) and I have run into a major design dilemma. This is a uni project btw, but it is 100% up to me what I develop.
I need to design a system whereby I can take an image and automatically crop a certain object within it, without user input. So for example, cut out the car in a picture of a road. I've given this a lot of thought, and I can't see any feasible method. I guess this thread is to discuss the issues and feasibility of achieving this goal. Eventually, I would get the dimensions of a car (or whatever it may be), and then pass this into a 3d modelling app (custom) as parameters, to render a 3d model. This last step is a lot more feasible. It's the cropping issue which is an issue. I have thought of all sorts of ideas, like getting the colour of the car and then the outline around that colour. So if the car (example) is yellow, when there is a yellow pixel in the image, trace around it. But this would fail if there are two yellow cars in a photo.
Ideally, I would like the system to be completely automated. But I guess I can't have everything my way. Also, my skills are in what I mentioned above (.NET 3.5, SQL Server, AJAX, web design) as opposed to C++ but I would be open to any solution just to see the feasibility.
I also found this patent: US Patent 7034848 - System and method for automatically cropping graphical images
Thanks
This is one of the problems that needed to be solved to finish the DARPA Grand Challenge. Google video has a great presentation by the project lead from the winning team, where he talks about how they went about their solution, and how some of the other teams approached it. The relevant portion starts around 19:30 of the video, but it's a great talk, and the whole thing is worth a watch. Hopefully it gives you a good starting point for solving your problem.
What you are talking about is an open research problem, or even several research problems. One way to tackle this, is by image segmentation. If you can safely assume that there is one object of interest in the image, you can try a figure-ground segmentation algorithm. There are many such algorithms, and none of them are perfect. They usually output a segmentation mask: a binary image where the figure is white and the background is black. You would then find the bounding box of the figure, and use it to crop. The thing to remember is that none of the existing segmentation algorithm will give you what you want 100% of the time.
Alternatively, if you know ahead of time what specific type of object you need to crop (car, person, motorcycle), then you can try an object detection algorithm. Once again, there are many, and none of them are perfect either. On the other hand, some of them may work better than segmentation if your object of interest is on very cluttered background.
To summarize, if you wish to pursue this, you would have to read a fair number of computer vision papers, and try a fair number of different algorithms. You will also increase your chances of success if you constrain your problem domain as much as possible: for example restrict yourself to a small number of object categories, assume there is only one object of interest in an image, or restrict yourself to a certain type of scenes (nature, sea, etc.). Also keep in mind, that even the accuracy of state-of-the-art approaches to solving this type of problems has a lot of room for improvement.
And by the way, the choice of language or platform for this project is by far the least difficult part.
A method often used for face detection in images is through the use of a Haar classifier cascade. A classifier cascade can be trained to detect any objects, not just faces, but the ability of the classifier is highly dependent on the quality of the training data.
This paper by Viola and Jones explains how it works and how it can be optimised.
Although it is C++ you might want to take a look at the image processing libraries provided by the OpenCV project which include code to both train and use Haar cascades. You will need a set of car and non-car images to train a system!
Some of the best attempts I've see of this is using a large database of images to help understand the image you have. These days you have flickr, which is not only a giant corpus of images, but it's also tagged with meta-information about what the image is.
Some projects that do this are documented here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=629
Start with analyzing the images yourself. That way you can formulate the criteria on which to match the car. And you get to define what you cannot match.
If all cars have the same background, for example, it need not be that complex. But your example states a car on a street. There may be parked cars. Should they be recognized?
If you have access to MatLab, you could test your pattern recognition filters with specialized software like PRTools.
Wwhen I was studying (a long time ago:) I used Khoros Cantata and found that an edge filter can simplify the image greatly.
But again, first define the conditions on the input. If you don't do that you will not succeed because pattern recognition is really hard (think about how long it took to crack captcha's)
I did say photo, so this could be a black car with a black background. I did think of specifying the colour of the object, and then when that colour is found, trace around it (high level explanation). But, with a black object in a black background (no constrast in other words), it would be a very difficult task.
Better still, I've come across several sites with 3d models of cars. I could always use this, stick it into a 3d model, and render it.
A 3D model would be easier to work with, a real world photo much harder. It does suck :(
If I'm reading this right... This is where AI shines.
I think the "simplest" solution would be to use a neural-network based image recognition algorithm. Unless you know that the car will look the exact same in each picture, then that's pretty much the only way.
If it IS the exact same, then you can just search for the pixel pattern, and get the bounding rectangle, and just set the image border to the inner boundary of the rectangle.
I think that you will never get good results without a real user telling the program what to do. Think of it this way: how should your program decide when there is more than 1 interesting object present (for example: 2 cars)? what if the object you want is actually the mountain in the background? what if nothing of interest is inside the picture, thus nothing to select as the object to crop out? etc, etc...
With that said, if you can make assumptions like: only 1 object will be present, then you can have a go with using image recognition algorithms.
Now that I think of it. I recently got a lecture about artificial intelligence in robots and in robotic research techniques. Their research went on about language interaction, evolution, and language recognition. But in order to do that they also needed some simple image recognition algorithms to process the perceived environment. One of the tricks they used was to make a 3D plot of the image where x and y where the normal x and y axis and the z axis was the brightness of that particular point, then they used the same technique for red-green values, and blue-yellow. And lo and behold they had something (relatively) easy they could use to pick out the objects from the perceived environment.
(I'm terribly sorry, but I can't find a link to the nice charts they had that showed how it all worked).
Anyway, the point is that they were not interested (that much) in image recognition so they created something that worked good enough and used something less advanced and thus less time consuming, so it is possible to create something simple for this complex task.
Also any good image editing program has some kind of magic wand that will select, with the right amount of tweaking, the object of interest you point it on, maybe it's worth your time to look into that as well.
So, it basically will mean that you:
have to make some assumptions, otherwise it will fail terribly
will probably best be served with techniques from AI, and more specifically image recognition
can take a look at paint.NET and their algorithm for their magic wand
try to use the fact that a good photo will have the object of interest somewhere in the middle of the image
.. but i'm not saying that this is the solution for your problem, maybe something simpler can be used.
Oh, and I will continue to look for those links, they hold some really valuable information about this topic, but I can't promise anything.