Blob detection using connected components labelling algorithm - algorithm

I'm trying to write an algorithm to detect blobs using connected component labeling on an image. I'm having difficulty on how to merge different labels if they are connected diagonally. Doing it for horizontally and vertically connected pixels seems easy . But i can't figure out a way to detect the pixels that are connected diagonally .because if it changes then there is a need to relabel the image w.r.t to that change for each changed pixel . I'm confused . Can you explain me how to handle this. I may be totally wrong about what i said (but i have achieved reasonable results doing only the horizontal and vertical connected components) , but it isn't the correct way. please advice to how to approach connected component labeling accurately. I'm only using arrays of image dimensions for comparing and labelling.

Well you are able to do horizontal and vertical, just add another direction for the diagonal, so you are looking for neighboring pixels in all directions as opposed just to vertical and horizontal.

Related

Automatically detect an image collage

I'm trying to automatically detect if an image is a collage vs a single photograph. I'm not too concerned with edge cases. What I'm trying to solve is rectangular collages like below. I've tried edge detection (canny) + vertical and horizontal sobel filtering + line detection (Hough transform) to try to identify perpendicular lines but am getting too many false positives. I'm not very good at image processing so any input would be welcome. Thx!
This is a challenge, because images "have the right" to contain verticals and horizontals, and there can be sudden changes in the background due to occlusion for instance.
But a clue can help you: the borders between two pictures are perfectly straight, "unnaturally" straight, and they are long.

Looking for algorithm to map an image to 4 sides polygon

This is more a math question than a programming question beside the fact that I must implement it using Delphi inside a graphic application.
Assuming I have a picture of a sheet of paper. The actual sheet of paper is of course a rectangular area. When the picture is shown on a computer screen the rectangular area is no more rectangular because when the picture was taken, the camera was not perfectly positioned above the sheet of paper. There is all kinds of perspective effects which result in deformations.
My application needs to tweak the image so that the original rectangular area is displayed as a rectangular area on screen.
Most photo processing software have an interactive tool to do that. The user draw a rectangular area on screen around the rectangular object and then drag each corner to deform the displayed rectangular area until he see the real area as rectangular. What I'm looking for is the algorithm to do that computation.
You need to split the problem into 2 steps. Find the edges or corners of the sheet and remap the pixels.
To find the corners or edges it's a really hard problem since they might be invisible, outside of the picture, obstructed, bent or deformed. Assuming you have a very simple setup (black uniform background, white paper, very little distortion) you could run an edge detection kernel over the image then find the 4 outer edges. If you find the edges you can intersect them to find the corners and the other way around.
Once you find the corners run an interpolation over the image to map the pixels onto the rectangle you want. You should be able to get the graphics engine to do this for you if you provide the coordinates of the corners as texture coordinates for the rectangle and map the image as a texture.
I made it sound simple, but you will encounter many parameters to set and experiment with.
It seems (because you mentioned bilinear interpolation) that you need perspective transformations.
There is implementation of perspective transformations (mapping of arbitrary convex quad to rectangle and vice versa) in Anti-Grain Geometry library (exe example). Delphi port.
With agg_trans_perspective one can calculate the matrix of persp. transformation and then apply it to map coordinates from one quad to another.

what's the use of Edge Detection of image?

After getting edge image using canny, what's the use of edge image?
Is there any use case of edge image?
find object and Segment it from image? or get the sharp,area and perimeter of the object?
As in the wikipedia,
Edge detection is the name for a set of mathematical methods which
aim at identifying points in a digital image at which the image
brightness changes sharply or, more formally, has discontinuities. The
points at which image brightness changes sharply are typically
organized into a set of curved line segments termed edges.
You can use this to find the interested area of an image by programmatically. For example, you have a lazer image of a indoor floor map and you want to detect the actual area a robot can visit, this will be useful. You can refer google more on this. It's just an example in real world usage.

Best Elliptical Fit for irregular shapes in an image

I have an image with arbitrary regions shape (say objects), let's assume the background pixels are labeled as zeros whereas any object has a unique label (pixels of object 1 are labeled as 1, object 2 pixels are labeled as 2,...). Now for every object, I need to find the best elliptical fit of its pixels. This requires finding the center of the object, the major and minor axis, and the rotation angle. How can I find these?
Thank you;
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one way to go. See Wikipedia here.
The centroid is easy enough to find if your shapes are convex - just a weighted average of intensities over the xy positions - and PCA will give you the major and minor axes, hence the orientation.
Once you have the centre and axes, you have the basis for a set of ellipses that cover your shape. Extending the axes - in proportion - and testing each pixel for in/out, you can find the ellipse that just covers your shape. Or if you prefer, you can project each pixel position onto the major and minor axes and find the rough limits in one pass and then test in/out on "corner" cases.
It may help if you post an example image.
As you seem to be using Matlab, you can simply use the regionprops command, given that you have the Image Processing Toolbox.
It can extract all the information you need (and many more properties of image regions) and it will do the PCA for you, if the PCA-based based approach suits your needs.
Doc is here, look for the 'Centroid', 'Orientation', 'MajorAxisLength' and 'MinorAxisLength' parameters specifically.

How do you mask an arbitrary area of an image to overlay another image?

I want to mask an arbitrary convex polygon area of an image and put another image into that area. I found this posting, but is wasn't clear to me if this applies only to rectangular areas and not arbitrary polygons.
The basic flow I am talking about is to have an (x,y) coordinate on the screen which would serve to be the center of my polygon (center in terms of an arbitrary point which is consistent for me). I would like to mask this area where the new image (polygonal in nature) would be displayed while leaving the rest of the screen as is.
Can I do this easily and quickly?
You have to use stencil buffer. It's basically another type of buffer that has plethora of awesome applications and one of the simplest one is masking. While I can't recommend any OpenGL ES specific tutorial off the top of my head, I highly recommend reading general tutorials, since it's not that different and surely is fascinating.
Try glScissor... it might be the rectangle you want.

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