convert image to matrix with specific values MATLAB - image

I have the image linked below I need to turn convert into a binary matrix. I need the green beads to be one value (0) and the silver beads another (1). I've tried converting it to black and white using various scalars, but the shadows create problems. Either the shadows need to be associated with the surrounding color or they need to become invisible such as below:
If shadows = 0, green = 1, silver =2
1 2 1 1
0 1 2 2
2 0 0 1
Would become
1 2 1 1
1 2 2
2 1
http://i1373.photobucket.com/albums/ag390/jmangler1/7-11GreenBB250_zpsb583a772.png

Take a look at Image segmentation with matlab
They also have a nice app for playing around with different techniques.

Related

Algorithm strategy to prevent values from bouncing between 2 values when on edge of two 'buckets'

I'm tracking various colored balls in OpenCV (Python) in real-time. The tracking is very stable. i.e. when stationary the values do not change with more then 1 / 2 pixels for the center of the circle.
However i'm running into what must surely be a well researched issue: I need to now place the positions of the balls into an rougher grid - essentially simply dividing (+ rounding) the x,y positions.
e.g.
input range is 0 -> 9
target range is 0 -> 1 (two buckets)
so i do: floor(input / 5)
input: [0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9]
output: [0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1]
This is fine, but the problem occurs when just a small change in the initial value might result it to be either in quickly changes output single I.e. at the 'edge' of the divisions -or a 'sensitive' area.
input: [4 5 4 5 4 5 5 4 ...]
output:[0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...]
i.e. values 4 and 5 (which falls withing the 1 pixel error/'noisy' margin) cause rapid changes in output.
What are some of the strategems / algorithms that deal with these so help me further?
I searched but it seems i do not how to express the issue correctly for Google (or StackOverflow).
I tried adding 'deadzones'. i.e. rather then purely dividing i leave 'gaps' in my ouput range which means a value sometimes has no output (i.e. between 'buckets'). This somewhat works but means i have a lot (i.e. the range of the fluctuation) of the screen that is not used...
i.e.
input = [0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9]
output = [0 0 0 0 x x 1 1 1 1]
Temporal averaging is not ideal (and doesn't work too well either) - and increases the latency.
I just have a 'hunch' there is a whole set of Computer / Signal science about this.

How to remove connected components from an image while retaining some

Let's say I have 5 connected components (labelled objects) in an image called labelledImage from bwlabel. How can I manipulate labelledImage so that the objects that are labelled as 1 and 4 only display, while removing the objects that are labelled as 2, 3 and 5. Then, how can I manipulate the original RGB image so that the connected components that are labelled as 1 and 4 only display.
I know how to retain a single connected component by using this line of code below. However, I don't know how to do this for multiple labelled regions.
Works.
connectedComponent1 = (labelledImage == 1);
imshow(connectedComponent1)
Doesn't work.
connectedComponent1and4 = (labelledImage == [1 4]);
imshow(connectedComponent1and4)
You can't do logical indexing that way. The simplest way is to perhaps use Boolean statements to combine things.
connectedCompoonent1and4 = labelledImage == 1 | labelledImage == 4;
In general, supposing you had a vector of elements that denote which components you want to keep, you could use bsxfun, permute and any to help you with that. Something like this should work:
components = [1 4];
connected = any(bsxfun(#eq, labelledImage, permute(components, [1 3 2])), 3);
The above code uses matrix broadcasting to create a temporary 3D matrix where each slice i contains the ith value of the vector components which contain the desired labels you want to keep. labelledImage is also replicated in the third dimension so the result using bsxfun creates a 3D matrix where each slice i segments out the ith object you want to keep. We then combine all of the objects together using any and looking in the third dimension.
If you don't like one-liners, you could even use a simple for loop:
components = [1 4];
connected = false(size(labelledImage, 1), size(labelledImage, 2));
for ind = 1 : numel(components)
connected = connected | labelledImage == components(ind);
end
This creates an output image that is all false, then we loop through each value in the vector of components you want to keep and append those results on top of the result. The end will give you all of the components you want to keep.
Lastly, you could use also use ismember and determine those values in your matrix that can be found between the label matrix and the components vector and simply create your mask that way:
connected = ismember(labelledImage, components);
Now that you have a mask of objects you want to extract out, to use this on the original image, simply multiply each channel with the mask. Another use of bsxfun can do that for you. Assuming your image in RGB is called img, simply do the following:
outImg = bsxfun(#times, img, cast(connected, class(img)));
To perform element-wise multiplication, you must ensure that both matrices that are being multiplied have the same type. I convert the mask into the same class as whatever the input image is and perform the multiplication.
Use ismember.
Ex:
A = randi(5,5); % your connected component matrix
B = [1 4] % list of components you want to keep
A =
4 2 1 3 5
2 4 2 5 1
3 4 5 1 4
1 4 1 3 5
4 3 5 1 5
A(~ismember(A,B)) = 0
A =
4 0 1 0 0
0 4 0 0 1
0 4 0 1 4
1 4 1 0 0
4 0 0 1 0

How to solve 5 * 5 Cube in efficient easy way

There is 5*5 cube puzzle named Happy cube Problem where for given mat , need to make a cube .
http://www.mathematische-basteleien.de/cube_its.htm#top
Its like, 6 blue mats are given-
From the following mats, Need to derive a Cube -
These way it has 3 more solutions.
So like first cub
For such problem, the easiest approach I could imagine was Recursion based where for each cube, I have 6 position , and for each position I will try check all other mate and which fit, I will go again recursively to solve the same. Like finding all permutations of each of the cube and then find which fits the best.So Dynamic Programming approach.
But I am making loads of mistake in recursion , so is there any better easy approach which I can use to solve the same?
I made matrix out of each mat or diagram provided, then I rotated them in each 90 clock-wise 4 times and anticlock wise times . I flip the array and did the same, now for each of the above iteration I will have to repeat the step for other cube, so again recursion .
0 0 1 0 1
1 1 1 1 1
0 1 1 1 0
1 1 1 1 1
0 1 0 1 1
-------------
0 1 0 1 0
1 1 1 1 0
0 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 0
1 1 0 1 1
-------------
1 1 0 1 1
0 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 0
0 1 1 1 1
0 1 0 1 0
-------------
1 0 1 0 0
1 1 1 1 1
0 1 1 1 0
1 1 1 1 1
1 1 0 1 0
-------------
1st - block is the Diagram
2nd - rotate clock wise
3rd - rotate anti clockwise
4th - flip
Still struggling to sort out the logic .
I can't believe this, but I actually wrote a set of scripts back in 2009 to brute-force solutions to this exact problem, for the simple cube case. I just put the code on Github: https://github.com/niklasb/3d-puzzle
Unfortunately the documentation is in German because that's the only language my team understood, but source code comments are in English. In particular, check out the file puzzle_lib.rb.
The approach is indeed just a straightforward backtracking algorithm, which I think is the way to go. I can't really say it's easy though, as far as I remember the 3-d aspect is a bit challenging. I implemented one optimization: Find all symmetries beforehand and only try each unique orientation of a piece. The idea is that the more characteristic the pieces are, the less options for placing pieces exist, so we can prune early. In the case of many symmetries, there might be lots of possibilities and we want to inspect only the ones that are unique up to symmetry.
Basically the algorithm works as follows: First, assign a fixed order to the sides of the cube, let's number them 0 to 5 for example. Then execute the following algorithm:
def check_slots():
for each edge e:
if slot adjacent to e are filled:
if the 1-0 patterns of the piece edges (excluding the corners)
have XOR != 0:
return false
if the corners are not "consistent":
return false
return true
def backtrack(slot_idx, pieces_left):
if slot_idx == 6:
# finished, we found a solution, output it or whatever
return
for each piece in pieces_left:
for each orientation o of piece:
fill slot slot_idx with piece in orientation o
if check_slots():
backtrack(slot_idx + 1, pieces_left \ {piece})
empty slot slot_idx
The corner consistency is a bit tricky: Either the corner must be filled by exactly one of the adjacent pieces or it must be accessible from a yet unfilled slot, i.e. not cut off by the already assigned pieces.
Of course you can ignore to drop some or all of the consistency checks and only check in the end, seeing as there are only 8^6 * 6! possible configurations overall. If you have more than 6 pieces, it becomes more important to prune early.

Explanation of Matlab's bwlabel,regionprops & centroid functions

I have spent all day reading up on the above MATLAB functions. I can't seem to find any good explanations online, even on the MathWorks website!
I would be very grateful if anyone could explain bwlabel, regionprops and centroid. How do they work if applied to a grayscale image?
Specifically, they are being used in this code below. How do the above functions apply to the code below?
fun=#minutie; L = nlfilter(K,[3 3],fun);
%% Termination LTerm=(L==1);
figure; imshow(LTerm)
LTermLab=bwlabel(LTerm);
propTerm=regionprops(LTermLab,'Centroid');
CentroidTerm=round(cat(1,LTerm(:).Centroid));
figure; imshow(~K)
set(gcf,'position',[1 1 600 600]); hold on
plot(CentroidTerm(:,1),CentroidTerm(:,2),'ro')
That's quite a mouthful to explain!... nevertheless, I'd love to explain it to you. However, I'm a bit surprised that you couldn't understand the documentation from MathWorks. It's actually quite good at explaining a lot (if not all...) of their functions.
BTW, bwlabel and regionprops are not defined for grayscale images. You can only apply these to binary images.
Update: bwlabel still has the restriction of accepting a binary image but regionprops no longer has this restriction. It can also take in a label matrix that is usually output from bwlabel as well as binary images.
Assuming binary images is what you want, my explanations for each function is as follows.
bwlabel
bwlabel takes in a binary image. This binary image should contain a bunch of objects that are separated from each other. Pixels that belong to an object are denoted with 1 / true while those pixels that are the background are 0 / false. For example, suppose we have a binary image that looks like this:
0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0
0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1
You can see in this image that there are four objects in this image. The definition of an object are those pixels that are 1 that are connected in a chain by looking at local neighbourhoods. We usually look at 8-pixel neighbourhoods where you look at the North, Northeast, East, Southeast, South, Southwest, West, Northwest directions. Another way of saying this is that the objects are 8-connected. For simplicity, sometimes people look at 4-pixel neighbourhoods, where you just look at the North, East, South and West directions. This woudl mean that the objects are 4-connected.
The output of bwlabel will give you an integer map where each object is assigned a unique ID. As such, the output of bwlabel would look something like this:
0 0 0 0 0 3 3 3 0 0
0 1 0 1 0 0 3 3 0 0
0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 4
0 0 2 2 2 2 0 0 4 4
Because MATLAB processes things in column major, that's why the labelling is how you see above. As such, bwlabel gives you the membership of each pixel. This tells you where each pixel belongs to if it falls on an object. 0 in this map corresponds to the background. To call bwlabel, you can do:
L = bwlabel(img);
img would be the binary image that you supply to the function and L is the integer map I just talked about. Additionally, you can provide 2 outputs to bwlabel, and the second parameter tells you how many objects exist in the image. As such:
[L, num] = bwlabel(img);
With our above example, num would be 4. As another method of invocation, you can specify the connected pixel neighbourhoods you would examine, and so you can do this:
[L, num] = bwlabel(img, N);
N would be the pixel neighbourhood you want to examine (i.e. 4 or 8).
regionprops
regionprops is a very useful function that I use daily. regionprops measures a variety of image quantities and features in a black and white image. Specifically, given a black and white image it automatically determines the properties of each contiguous white region that is 8-connected. One of these particular properties is the centroid. This is also the centre of mass. You can think of this as the "middle" of the object. This would be the (x,y) locations of where the middle of each object is located. As such, the Centroid for regionprops works such that for each object that is seen in your image, this would calculate the centre of mass for the object and the output of regionprops would return a structure where each element of this structure would tell you what the centroid is for each of the objects in your black and white image. Centroid is just one of the properties. There are other useful features as well, but I'm assuming you don't want to do this. To call regionprops, you would do this:
s = regionprops(img, 'Centroid');
The above code will calculate the centroids of each of your objects in the image. You can specify additional flags to regionprops to specify each feature that you want. I do highly encourage that you take a look at all of the possible features that regionprops can calculate, as there are many that are useful in a variety of different applications and situations.
Also, by omitting any flags as input into the function, you would calculate all of the features in your image by default. Therefore, if we were to declare the image that we have seen above in MATLAB, this is what would happen after I run regionprops. After, let's calculate what the centroids are:
img = logical(...
[0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0;
0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0;
0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0;
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1;
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1;
0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1]);
s = regionprops(img, 'Centroid');
... and finally when we display the centroids:
>> disp(cat(1,s.Centroid))
3.0000 2.6000
4.5000 6.0000
7.2000 1.4000
9.6000 5.2000
As such, the first centroid is located at (x,y) = (3, 2.6), the next centroid is located at (x,y) = (4.5, 6) and so on. Take special note that the x co-ordinate is the column while the y co-ordinate is the row.
Hope this is clear!

How can I find the most dense regions in an image?

Consider a black and white image like this
What I am trying to do is to find the region where the white points are most dense. In this case there are 20-21 such dense regions (i.e. the clusters of points makes a dense region).
Can anyone give me any hint on how this can be achieved?
If you have access to the Image Processing Toolbox, you can take advantage of a number of filtering and morphological operations it contains. Here's one way you could approach your problem, using the functions imfilter, imclose, and imregionalmax:
% Load and plot the image data:
imageData = imread('lattice_pic.jpg'); % Load the lattice image
subplot(221);
imshow(imageData);
title('Original image');
% Gaussian-filter the image:
gaussFilter = fspecial('gaussian', [31 31], 9); % Create the filter
filteredData = imfilter(imageData, gaussFilter);
subplot(222);
imshow(filteredData);
title('Gaussian-filtered image');
% Perform a morphological close operation:
closeElement = strel('disk', 31); % Create a disk-shaped structuring element
closedData = imclose(filteredData, closeElement);
subplot(223);
imshow(closedData);
title('Closed image');
% Find the regions where local maxima occur:
maxImage = imregionalmax(closedData);
maxImage = imdilate(maxImage, strel('disk', 5)); % Dilate the points to see
% them better on the plot
subplot(224);
imshow(maxImage);
title('Maxima locations');
And here's the image the above code creates:
To get things to look good I just kept trying a few different combinations for the parameters for the Gaussian filter (created using fspecial) and the structuring element (created using strel). However, that little bit of trial and error gave a very nice result.
NOTE: The image returned from imregionalmax doesn't always have just single pixels set to 1 (to indicate a maxima). The output image often contains clusters of pixels because neighboring pixels in the input image can have equal values, and are therefore both counted as maxima. In the code above I also dilated these points with imdilate just to make them easier to see in the image, which makes an even bigger cluster of pixels centered on the maxima. If you want to reduce the cluster of pixels to a single pixel, you should remove the dilation step and modify the image in other ways (add noise to the result or filter it, then find the new maxima, etc.).
Sliding Window (simple but slow)
You could create a sliding window (e.g. 10x10 pixels size) which iterates over the image, and for each position you count the number of white pixels in this 10x10 field, and store the positions with the highest counts.
This whole process is O(n*m) where n is the number of pixels of the image, and m the size of the sliding window.
In other words, you convolve the image with a mean filter (here the box filter), and then use the extrema.
Sliding Window (fast)
At first, calculate a summed area table, which can be done very efficiently in a single pass:
create a 2D array sat with the same size as the original image img.
Iterate over each index, and calculate for each index x and y
sat[x, y] = img[x, y] + sat[x-1, y] + sat[x, y-1] - sat[x-1, y-1]
For example, given an image where 0 is dark and 1 is white, this is the result:
img sat
0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1
0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 2
0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 2 5 5 5
0 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 3 6 6 6
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 3 6 6 6
Now iterate over the summed area table's indices with a sliding window, and calculate the number of white pixels in it by using the corners A, B, C, D of the sliding window:
img sat window
0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 A-----B 1
0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 2 0 | 0 2 | 2
0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 2 5 5 5 0 | 2 5 | 5
0 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 3 6 6 6 0 | 3 6 | 6
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 3 6 6 6 0 D-----C 6
Calculate
density(x', y') = sat(A) + sat(C) - sat(B) - sat(D)
Which in the above example is
density(1, 0) = 0 + 6 - 1 - 2 = 3
This process requires a temporary image, but it is just O(n), so speed is independent of the sliding window's size.
if you have the image processing toolbox, blur it with a gaussian filter, then find the peaks/extrema.
vary the size of the gaussian filter to get the number of 'dense' regions you want.
Maybe a naive approach:
You define a square of n*n which is the maximum size of the region in which you measure the density. For each point in the image you consider the point as the center of the square and count around the number of black (b) and white (w) points. Using the difference b-w you can determine in which square(s) is the most white.
The most dense regions must be determined in a fuzzy way. If one region has 600 white points and another 599 then, for the human eye, they are the same density. 600 is 100% dense while 599 is 99% dense and 1% non-dense. Use an epsilon for this.
n can be predefined or based on some function (ie. percent of image size).
You could also use a circle/ellipse instead of square/rectangle. Choose what fits your needs best

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