Averaging images sequentially - image

I realize there might be a better place to ask this, but I think you all will have some valuable feedback.
People are asked to draw a shape in black on a white cavas. Then their drawing is added to the running average. I'd like to have the parts that the images mostly have in common be shown, and the parts of the drawing that are unlike most of the other drawings disappear.
My two problems are that I'm using ImageMagick to process the images, which means that I can only create a composite of two images at once. So I have the running total image, and the newest one to add. I cannot get a real average this way.
Secondly, I do not fully understand blending modes particularly when different opacities are involved. I'm not sure which is the best to use.

When you add the first two images you blend them equally. But then when you add the 3rd image to the mix you have to change the weight of each image. The two image composite should be blended at 66.6% while the new image should contribute just 33.3%. For the 4th image you will blend at 75% and 25% respectively. In general, if you have n images in the composite, then the new image should contribute 100/(n+1) percent when added.
As you see, the more images you have the less an individual image affects the composite result.

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Tensorflow object detection training

I would like to detect objects (upper half of the image below) in images (bottom half). Is it smart to train the dataset with images in a different scale (or size)? Or shall I train it with parts of the bottom half of the image below? What is the best way to mark the objects for training?
Kind regards
If I understand your question correctly. If you are exclusively interested in detecting objects at roughly the scale of the below picture, your training data should consist of images like the below one. To add on: try to get at least a decent range of sizes around the bottom so as to avoid small deviations from a specific scale throwing it off, but generally you should be fine.

anyway to remove algorithmically discolorations from aerial imagery

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!

Pulling non-transparent areas to the center of the transparent areas in an image

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.

Algorithm to detect the change in visible luminosity in an image

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?

Using a TreeMap with images

For representing most popular artists from EchoNest API, I've been trying to set-up Silverlight Toolkit's TreeMap using images, their TreeItemDefinition.ValueBinding being defined as the area of the image.
While it mostly fills up the space when the image stretch is set to 'Fill' :
When setting image stretch to 'Uniform' a lot of blank spaces remain :
On this post, image carving is suggested : Treemapping with a given aspect ratio
How can I know which images should be carved and at what dimensions they should be carved if possible at all ?
Is this problem solvable without human intervention for a good result ?
I don't think there is a way to know which images should be carved and at what dimensions they should be carved. An ok-ish euristic might be to check if the mean energy of an image is > a certain threshold (this can be refined to check only blocks of every image, and combining the result later: if the image has blocks without details/energy, it can be carved, at least in that section).
What i think would be better is to apply seam carving to the already composed image: that will try to carve out the white outlines (adding "artificial" energy to the patches of images might lead to even better results, preserving more the shapes of each image). This paper might be of use to check out other image resizing methods too.

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