Tesseract hOCR: How to detect upside down? - image

(I'll answer my own question here for general knowledge)
In Tesseract OCR, how do you detect an image that is upside down?
People who have worked with Tesseract may, or may not, know that Tesseract can read images that are being presented upside down.
The issue however is in that you do not know that it is upside down if you use hOCR output, as nowhere in the document it is said.
So how to detect it?

After double checking, I noticed that it really is not directly in the hOCR output, I would expect some attribute in the ocr_page div denoting the orientation.
What I do have figured out is that you can read the y-values of the bounding box of all ocr_careas per page:
If the values go from low to high, then the page is in normal orientation.
If the values go from high to low, then the page is upside down.
This may or may not work for 90 and 270 degrees rotation, but it could very well be that you see a similar pattern for the x-value.

Related

How to count the number of spots in this image?

I am trying to count the number of hairs transplanted in the following image. So practically, I have to count the number of spots I can find in the center of image.
(I've uploaded the inverted image of a bald scalp on which new hairs have been transplanted because the original image is bloody and absolutely disgusting! To see the original non-inverted image click here. To see the larger version of the inverted image just click on it). Is there any known image processing algorithm to detect these spots? I've found out that the Circle Hough Transform algorithm can be used to find circles in an image, I'm not sure if it's the best algorithm that can be applied to find the small spots in the following image though.
P.S. According to one of the answers, I tried to extract the spots using ImageJ, but the outcome was not satisfactory enough:
I opened the original non-inverted image (Warning! it's bloody and disgusting to see!).
Splited the channels (Image > Color > Split Channels). And selected the blue channel to continue with.
Applied Closing filter (Plugins > Fast Morphology > Morphological Filters) with these values: Operation: Closing, Element: Square, Radius: 2px
Applied White Top Hat filter (Plugins > Fast Morphology > Morphological Filters) with these values: Operation: White Top Hat, Element: Square, Radius: 17px
However I don't know what to do exactly after this step to count the transplanted spots as accurately as possible. I tried to use (Process > Find Maxima), but the result does not seem accurate enough to me (with these settings: Noise tolerance: 10, Output: Single Points, Excluding Edge Maxima, Light Background):
As you can see, some white spots have been ignored and some white areas which are not actually hair transplant spots, have been marked.
What set of filters do you advise to accurately find the spots? Using ImageJ seems a good option since it provides most of the filters we need. Feel free however, to advise what to do using other tools, libraries (like OpenCV), etc. Any help would be highly appreciated!
I do think you are trying to solve the problem in a bit wrong way. It might sound groundless, so I'd better show my results first.
Below I have a crop of you image on the left and discovered transplants on the right. Green color is used to highlight areas with more than one transplant.
The overall approach is very basic (will describe it later), but still it provides close to be accurate results. Please note, it was a first try, so there is a lot of room for enhancements.
Anyway, let's get back to the initial statement saying you approach is wrong. There are several major issues:
the quality of your image is awful
you say you want to find spots, but actually you are looking for hair transplant objects
you completely ignores the fact average head is far from being flat
it does look like you think filters will add some important details to your initial image
you expect algorithms to do magic for you
Let's review all these items one by one.
1. Image quality
It might be very obvious statement, but before the actual processing you need to make sure you have best possible initial data. You might spend weeks trying to find a way to process photos you have without any significant achievements. Here are some problematic areas:
I bet it is hard for you to "read" those crops, despite the fact you have the most advanced object recognition algorithms in your brain.
Also, your time is expensive and you still need best possible accuracy and stability. So, for any reasonable price try to get: proper contrast, sharp edges, better colors and color separation.
2. Better understanding of the objects to be identified
Generally speaking, you have a 3D objects to be identified. So you can analyze shadows in order to improve accuracy. BTW, it is almost like a Mars surface analysis :)
3. The form of the head should not be ignored
Because of the form of the head you have distortions. Again, in order to get proper accuracy those distortions should be corrected before the actual analysis. Basically, you need to flatten analyzed area.
3D model source
4. Filters might not help
Filters do not add information, but they can easily remove some important details. You've mentioned Hough transform, so here is interesting question: Find lines in shape
I will use this question as an example. Basically, you need to extract a geometry from a given picture. Lines in shape looks a bit complex, so you might decide to use skeletonization
All of a sadden, you have more complex geometry to deal with and virtually no chances to understand what actually was on the original picture.
5. Sorry, no magic here
Please be aware of the following:
You must try to get better data in order to achieve better accuracy and stability. The model itself is also very important.
Results explained
As I said, my approach is very simple: image was posterized and then I used very basic algorithm to identify areas with a specific color.
Posterization can be done in a more clever way, areas detection can be improved, etc. For this PoC I just have a simple rule to highlight areas with more than one implant. Having areas identified a bit more advanced analysis can be performed.
Anyway, better image quality will let you use even simple method and get proper results.
Finally
How did the clinic manage to get Yondu as client? :)
Update (tools and techniques)
Posterization - GIMP (default settings,min colors)
Transplant identification and visualization - Java program, no libraries or other dependencies
Having areas identified it is easy to find average size, then compare to other areas and mark significantly bigger areas as multiple transplants.
Basically, everything is done "by hand". Horizontal and vertical scan, intersections give areas. Vertical lines are sorted and used to restore the actual shape. Solution is homegrown, code is a bit ugly, so do not want to share it, sorry.
The idea is pretty obvious and well explained (at least I think so). Here is an additional example with different scan step used:
Yet another update
A small piece of code, developed to verify a very basic idea, evolved a bit, so now it can handle 4K video segmentation in real-time. The idea is the same: horizontal and vertical scans, areas defined by intersected lines, etc. Still no external libraries, just a lot of fun and a bit more optimized code.
Additional examples can be found on YouTube: RobotsCanSee
or follow the progress in Telegram: RobotsCanSee
I've just tested this solution using ImageJ, and it gave good preliminary result:
On the original image, for each channel
Small (radius 1 or 2) closing in order to get rid of the hairs (black part in the middle of the white one)
White top-hat of radius 5 in order to detect the white part around each black hair.
Small closing/opening in order to clean a little bit the image (you can also use a median filter)
Ultimate erode in order to count the number of white blob remaining. You can also certainly use a LoG (Laplacian of Gaussian) or a distance map.
[EDIT]
You don't detect all the white spots using the maxima function, because after the closing, some zones are flat, so the maxima is not a point, but a zone. At this point, I think that an ultimate opening or an ultimate eroded would give you the center or each white spot. But I am not sure that there is a function/pluggin doing it in ImageJ. You can take a look to Mamba or SMIL.
A H-maxima (after white top-hat) may also clean a little bit more your results and improve the contrast between the white spots.
As Renat mentioned, you should not expect algorithms to do magic for you, however I'm hopeful to come up with a reasonable estimate of the number of spots. Here, I'm going to give you some hints and resources, check them out and call me back if you need more information.
First, I'm kind of hopeful to morphological operations, but I think a perfect pre-processing step may push the accuracy yielded by them dramatically. I want you put my finger on the pre-processing step. Thus I'm going ti work with this image:
That's the idea:
Collect and concentrate the mass around the spot locations. What do I mean my concentrating the masses? Let's open the book from the other side: As you see, the provided image contains some salient spots surrounded by some noisy gray-level dots.
By dots, I mean the pixels that are not part of a spot, but their gray-value are larger than zero (pure black) - which are available around the spots. It is clear that if you clear these noisy dots, you surely will come up with a good estimate of spots using other processing tools such as morphological operations.
Now, how to make the image more sharp? What if we could make the dots to move forward to their nearest spots? This is what I mean by concentrating the masses over the spots. Doing so, only the prominent spots will be present in the image and hence we have made a significant step toward counting the prominent spots.
How to do the concentrating thing? Well, the idea that I just explained is available in this paper, which its code is luckily available. See the section 2.2. The main idea is to use a random walker to walk on the image for ever. The formulations is stated such that the walker will visit the prominent spots far more times and that can lead to identifying the prominent spots. The algorithm is modeled Markov chain and The equilibrium hitting times of the ergodic Markov chain holds the key for identifying the most salient spots.
What I described above is just a hint and you should read that short paper to get the detailed version of the idea. Let me know if you need more info or resources.
That is a pleasure to think on such interesting problems. Hope it helps.
You could do the following:
Threshold the image using cv::threshold
Find connected components using cv::findcontour
Reject the connected components of size larger than a certain size as you seem to be concerned about small circular regions only.
Count all the valid connected components.
Hopefully, you have a descent approximation of the actual number of spots.
To be statistically more accurate, you could repeat 1-4 for a range of thresholds and take the average.
This is what you get after applying unsharpen radius 22, amount 5, threshold 2 to your image.
This increases the contrast between the dots and the surrounding areas. I used the ballpark assumption that the dots are somewhere between 18 and 25 pixels in diameter.
Now you can take the local maxima of white as a "dot" and fill it in with a black circle until the circular neighborhood of the dot (a circle of radius 10-12) erases the dot. This should let you "pick off" the dots joined to each other in clusters more than 2. Then look for local maxima again. Rinse and repeat.
The actual "dot" areas are in stark contrast to the surrounding areas, so this should let you pick them off as well as you would by eyeballing it.

Remove background and get deer as a fore ground?

I want to remove background and get deer as a foreground image.
This is my source image captured by trail camera:
This is what I want to get. This output image can be a binary image or RGB.
I worked on it and try many methods to get solution but every time it failed at specific point. So please first understand what is my exact problem.
Image are captured by a trail camera and camera is motion detector. when deer come in front of camera it capture image.
Scene mode change with respect to weather changing or day and night etc. So I can't use frame difference or some thing like this.
Segmentation may be not work correctly because Foreground (deer) and Background have same color in many cases.
If anyone still have any ambiguity in my question then please first ask me to clear and then answer, it will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Here's what I would do:
As was commented to your question, you can detect the dear and then perform grabcut to segment it from the picture.
To detect the dear, I would couple a classifier with a sliding window approach. That would mean that you'll have a classifier that given a patch (can be a large patch) in the image, output's a score of how much that patch is similar to a dear. The sliding window approach means that you loop on the window size and then loop on the window location. For each position of the window in the image, you should apply the classifier on that window and get a score of how much that window "looks like" a dear. Once you've done that, threshold all the scores to get the "best windows", i.e. the windows that are most similar to a dear. The rational behind this is that if we a dear is present at some location in the image, the classifier will output a high score at all windows that are close/overlap with the actual dear location. We would like to merge all that locations to a single location. That can be done by applying the functions groupRectangles from OpenCV:
http://docs.opencv.org/modules/objdetect/doc/cascade_classification.html#grouprectangles
Take a look at some face detection example from OpenCV, it basically does the same (sliding window + classifier) where the classifier is a Haar cascade.
Now, I didn't mention what that "dear classifier" can be. You can use HOG+SVM (which are both included in OpenCV) or use a much powerful approach of running a deep convulutional neural network (deep CNN). Luckily, you don't need to train a deep CNN. You can use the following packages with their "off the shelf" ImageNet networks (which are very powerful and might even be able to identify a dear without further training):
Decaf- which can be used only for research purposes:
https://github.com/UCB-ICSI-Vision-Group/decaf-release/
Or Caffe - which is BSD licensed:
http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/
There are other packages of which you can read about here:
http://deeplearning.net/software_links/
The most common ones are Theano, Cuda ConvNet's and OverFeat (but that's really opinion based, you should chose the best package from the list that I linked to).
The "off the shelf" ImageNet network were trained on roughly 10M images from 1000 categories. If those categories contain "dear", that you can just use them as is. If not, you can use them to extract features (as a 4096 dimensional vector in the case of Decaf) and train a classifier on positive and negative images to build a "dear classifier".
Now, once you detected the dear, meaning you have a bounding box around it, you can apply grabcut:
http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/doc/py_tutorials/py_imgproc/py_grabcut/py_grabcut.html
You'll need an initial scribble on the dear to perform grabcu. You can just take a horizontal line in the middle of the bounding box and hope that it will be on the dear's torso. More elaborate approaches would be to find the symmetry axis of the dear and use that as a scribble, but you would have to google, research an implement some method to extract symmetry axis from the image.
That's about it. Not straightforward, but so is the problem.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Try OpenCV Background Substraction with Mixture of Gaussians models. They should be adaptable enough for your scenes. Of course, the final performance will depend on the scenario, but it is worth trying.
Since you just want to separate the background from the foreground I think you do not need to recognize the deer. You need to recognize an object in motion in the scene. You just need to separate what is static in a significant interval of time (background) from what is not static: the deer.
There are algorithms that combine multiple frames from the same scene in order to determine the background, like THIS ONE.
You mentioned that the scene mode changes with respect to weather changing or day and night considering photos of different deers.
You could implement a solution when motion is detected, instead of taking a single photo, it could take a few ones with some interval of time.
This interval has to be long as to get the deer in different positions or out of the scene and at the same time short enough to not be much affected by scene variations. Perhaps you need to deal with some brightness variation, but I think it is feasible to determine the background using these frames and finally segment the deer in the "motion frame".

Rectangle detection in image

I'd like to program a detection of a rectangular sheet of paper which doesn't absolutely need to be perfectly straight on each side as I may take a picture of it "in the air" which means the single sides of the paper might get distorted a bit.
The app (iOs and android) CamScanner does this very very good and Im wondering how this might be implemented. First of all I thought of doing:
smoothing / noise reduction
Edge detection (canny etc) OR thresholding (global / adaptive)
Hough Transformation
Detecting lines (only vertically / horizontally allowed)
Calculate the intercept point of 4 found lines
But this gives me much problems with different types of images.
And I'm wondering if there's maybe a better approach in directly detecting a rectangular-like shape in an image and if so, if maybe camscanner does implement it like this as well!?
Here are some images taken in CamScanner.
These ones are detected quite nicely even though in a) the side is distorted (but the corner still gets shown in the overlay but doesnt really fit the corner of the white paper) and in b) the background is pretty close to the actual paper but it still gets recognized correctly:
It even gets the rotated pictures correctly:
And when Im inserting some testing errors, it fails but at least detects some of the contour, but always try to detect it as a rectangle:
And here it fails completely:
I suppose in the last three examples, if it would do hough transformation, it could have detected at least two of the four sides of the rectangle.
Any ideas and tips?
Thanks a lot in advance
OpenCV framework may help your problem. Also, you can look to this document for the Android platform.
The full source code is available on Github.

Enlarging image without affecting clarity

I need to enlarge the image downloaded without affecting its clarity.but when resized its clarity has gone.Can any one help?
Given the context, by clarity I assume you mean visual appearance. You want your upscaled image, again I believe you are dealing with upscaling and not downscaling (it is not specified in your problem), to look visually good. We actually can magically create detail, but probably not a perfect one. There are techniques for specifically working with pixelated images, hqx or http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/paper/pixel.pdf for instance. Since that is not clear from your description either, I'm simply assuming you have images of any kind.
With these considerations, you have yet to describe what you tried. Let me guess you tried a nearest neighbor interpolation, so you get something like:
There are other common types of interpolation. Like bicubic, Lanczos or something more modern like ICBI or http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~raananf/projects/lss_upscale/paper.pdf. Consider the first three of those, we get the respective results:
It may be a little hard to visualize the differences among these last three, but if you zoom into the actual images then you will be able to notice them. ICBI gives sharpest edges in this case.
Image resizing will always affect clarity, unless you downloaded a vector graphics image. See if the image has a vector graphics format, and if so, download that.
Failing that, you could try to see if larger image sizes are available, as generally shrinking hurts the image quality less than increasing.

How can I deblur an image in matlab?

I need to remove the blur this image:
Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/63036721#N02/5733034767/
Any Ideas?
Although previous answers are right when they say that you can't recover lost information, you could investigate a little and make a few guesses.
I downloaded your image in what seems to be the original size (75x75) and you can see here a zoomed segment (one little square = one pixel)
It seems a pretty linear grayscale! Let's verify it by plotting the intensities of the central row. In Mathematica:
ListLinePlot[First /# ImageData[i][[38]][[1 ;; 15]]]
So, it is effectively linear, starting at zero and ending at one.
So you may guess it was originally a B&W image, linearly blurred.
The easiest way to deblur that (not always giving good results, but enough in your case) is to binarize the image with a 0.5 threshold. Like this:
And this is a possible way. Just remember we are guessing a lot here!
HTH!
You cannot generally retrieve missing information.
If you know what it is an image of, in this case a Gaussian or Airy profile then it's probably an out of focus image of a point source - you can determine the characteristics of the point.
Another technique is to try and determine the character tics of the blurring - especially if you have many images form the same blurred system. Then iteratively create a possible source image, blur it by that convolution and compare it to the blurred image.
This is the general technique used to make radio astronomy source maps (images) and was used for the flawed Hubble Space Telescope images
When working with images one of the most common things is to use a convolution filter. There is a "sharpen" filter that does what it can to remove blur from an image. An example of a sharpen filter can be found here:
http://www.panoramafactory.com/sharpness/sharpness.html
Some programs like matlab make convolution really easy: conv2(A,B)
And most nice photo editing have the filters under some name or another (sharpen usually).
But keep in mind that filters can only do so much. In theory, the actual information has been lost by the blurring process and it is impossible to perfectly reconstruct the initial image (no matter what TV will lead you to believe).
In this case it seems like you have a very simple image with only black and white. Knowing this about your image you could always use a simple threshold. Set everything above a certain threshold to white, and everything below to black. Once again most photo editing software makes this really easy.
You cannot retrieve missing information, but under certain assumptions you can sharpen.
Try unsharp masking.

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