I have a database of images. When I take a new picture, I want to compare it against the images in this database and receive a similarity score (using OpenCV). This way I want to detect, if I have an image, which is very similar to the fresh picture.
Is it possible to create a fingerprint/hash of my database images and match new ones against it?
I'm searching for a alogrithm code snippet or technical demo and not for a commercial solution.
Best,
Stefan
As Pual R has commented, this "fingerprint/hash" is usually a set of feature vectors or a set of feature descriptors. But most of feature vectors used in computer vision are usually too computationally expensive for searching against a database. So this task need a special kind of feature descriptors because such descriptors as SURF and SIFT will take too much time for searching even with various optimizations.
The only thing that OpenCV has for your task (object categorization) is implementation of Bag of visual Words (BOW).
It can compute special kind of image features and train visual words vocabulary. Next you can use this vocabulary to find similar images in your database and compute similarity score.
Here is OpenCV documentation for bag of words. Also OpenCV has a sample named bagofwords_classification.cpp. It is really big but might be helpful.
Content-based image retrieval systems are still a field of active research: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/search?q=content-based+image+retrieval
First you have to be clear, what constitutes similar in your context:
Similar color distribution: Use something like color descriptors for subdivisions of the image, you should get some fairly satisfying results.
Similar objects: Since the computer does not know, what an object is, you will not get very far, unless you have some extensive domain knowledge about the object (or few object classes). A good overview about the current state of research can be seen here (results) and soon here.
There is no "serve all needs"-algorithm for the problem you described. The more you can share about the specifics of your problem, the better answers you might get. Posting some representative images (if possible) and describing the desired outcome is also very helpful.
This would be a good question for computer-vision.stackexchange.com, if it already existed.
You can use pHash Algorithm and store phash value in Database, then use this code:
double const mismatch = algo->compare(image1Hash, image2Hash);
Here 'mismatch' value can easly tell you the similarity ratio between two images.
pHash function:
AverageHash
PHASH
MarrHildrethHash
RadialVarianceHash
BlockMeanHash
BlockMeanHash
ColorMomentHash
These function are well Enough to evaluate Image Similarities in Every Aspects.
Related
Given an image of the region containing the lips and other "noise" (teeth, skin), how can we isolate and recolor only the lips (simulating a "lipstick" effect)?
Attached is a photo describing the lips/mouth states.
What we have tried so far is a three-part process:
Color matching the lips using a stable point on the lips (provided by internal API).
Use this color as the base color for the lips isolation.
Recolor the lips (lipstick behavior)
We tried a few algorithms like hue difference, HSV difference, ∆and E after converting them to CIE color space. Unfortunately, nothing has panned out or has produced artifacts due to the skin's relative similarity in color to the lips and the discoloration from shadows cast by the nose and mouth.
What are we missing? Is there a better way to approach it?
We are looking for a solution/direction from a classic Computer Vision color algorithm, not a solution from the Machine Learning/Depp Learning domain. Thanks!
You probably won't like this answer, but your question is ill-posed (there is no measurable solution that is better than others, there are only peoples' opinions.)
In this case, the best answer you can hope for then is usually:
Ask an expert for a large set of examples that would be acceptable in practice.
Your problem can easily be solved by an appropriate artist (who you trust will produce usable results) with access to the right tools (for example photoshop,) but a single artist (or even a group of them) can't possibly scale to millions (or whatever large number you care about) of examples.
To address the short-coming of the artist-based solution, you can use the following strategy:
Collect a sufficiently large set of before and after images created by artists, who you deem trustworthy.
Apply your favorite machine learning algorithm to learn a mapping from the before to the after images. There are many possible choices, and it almost really doesn't matter which you choose as long as you know how to use it well.
Note, the above two steps are usually not one-and-done, as most algorithms are. Usually, you will come across pathological or not-well behaved examples to your ML solution above in using the product. The key is to collect these examples, pass them through the artist and retrain or update your ML model. Repeat this enough times and you will produce a state-of-the-art solution to your problem.
Whether you have the funding, time, motivation and resources to accomplish this is another matter.
You should try semantic segmentation techniques that would definitely give you very good results and it would be a generalized concept.
What are the different options and solutions (software) that will help distinguish professional (good) from amateur (bad) photo?
The criteria can be the contrast, sharpness, noise, presence of compression artifacts, etc. The question is, what are the tools that allow all this to determine it (the machine, not the man). For all of these criteria can be represented as mathematical models, you think?
Or in other words - to "feed" tool 1000 high-quality photos and 1000 substandard. And machine itself has identified the factors that distinguish the good from the bad image.
This is a quite vague definition of a problem. The only thing you have is 1000 high-quality photos and 1000 substandard photos. Your application however, is quite concrete, and I doubt (but I'm not sure) that you will find such a software.
Without looking to your images and have some tests is also difficult to say if contrast/gamma would be enough to classify them properly.
What you can do, if you know a bit of coding in matlab/python/C, is to use some existing libraries to try to solve your problem. I can't help you with that, as this itself is a quite tedious work, but, I can give you some insights.
To define your problem you will need:
Input: 1000 pro images, 1000 std images
You can represent this as 2000 images and a 2000 binary vector (1 for pro, 0 for std)
Features
Images itself might not give you enough information. What you can do is extract features from images. This step is called feature extraction and is an open research field in Computer Vision. There several feature extractors out there, you can try a couple of the most used ones, such as HoG or SIFT (have a look here for examples).
This feature extractors will give you a 1xM numerical vector for each image. With N images, you have a NxM matrix composed of N images and their descriptor.
Classification:
Once you managed to extract features from the image, having X = NxM data and y = label binary vector, you can use any machine learning algorithm, such as Deep Neural Networks, Random Forests, Supported Vector Machines, or any other one, to train your data, and classify it later.
By putting everything together, you might be able to get decent results.
Is this professional vs amateur photographer or equipment classification? I mean like distinguishing between a DLSR photo or a cell phone photo. Or is this distinguishing between an amateur with a DLSR and a professional with the same equipment? Or, are we talking about photoshop editing at the end.
In the case of equipment, I think features to look at would be noise, contrast, color gamut. In the case of skill of the photographer, you will probably have to look at features based on edge representations, natural scene metrics etc.
But, you will need to create a data matrix and then run a machine learning classification algorithm on it and hopefully find some features.
Are you making or looking for art for humans or for robots?
The definition of a great photo is subjective by definition. What to one person may be junk to another is genius. Trying to take that and turn it into an equation is asking for AI to take over humankind.
I don't mean to be harsh in my assessment. My degree is in Fine Art, Painting. I put a lot of time and effort into thinking about images. It's a wonder to me how a child might make an image that seemed to be thoughtless but was a breakthrough in my perception. Conversely you can work for hours, day, months or even years and then feel like the result just doesn't measure up.
Photography is an ingenious invention, therefore all photography is a source for amazement.
I do agree with you however. Some photos are truly impressive. I think that if we approach this as coders than what we are seeking is 'likes' or 'page views' or some other method of getting counts from many people. I know that is not the answer you were looking for but I don't think you can find a better one. I wish you well on your quest.
If you want to judge a photo on technicalities then the edge of the physics should be your target. Currently that would be mirrorless cameras and 3d imaging.
I am working on a feature matching project and i am using OpenCV Python as the tool for developed the application.
According to the project requirement, my database have images of some objects like glass, ball,etc ....with their descriptions. User can send images to the back end of the application and back end is responsible for matching the sent image with images which are exist in the database and send the image description to the user.
I had done some research on the above scenario. Unfortunately still i could not find a algorithm for matching two images and identifying both are matching or not.
If any body have that kind of algorithm please send me.(I have to use OpenCV python or JavaCV)
Thank you
This is a very common problem in Computer Vision nowadays. A simple solution is really simple. But there are many, many variants for more sophisticated solutions.
Simple Solution
Feature Detector and Descriptor based.
The idea here being that you get a bunch of keypoints and their descriptors (search for SIFT/SURF/ORB). You can then find matches easily with tools provided in OpenCV. You would match the keypoints in your query image against all keypoints in the training dataset. Because of typical outliers, you would like to add a robust matching technique, like RanSaC. All of this is part of OpenCV.
Bag-of-Word model
If you want just the image that is as much the same as your query image, you can use Nearest-Neighbour search. Be aware that OpenCV comes with the much faster Approximated-Nearest-Neighbour (ANN) algorithm. Or you can use the BruteForceMatcher.
Advanced Solution
If you have many images (many==1 Million), you can look at Locality-Sensitive-Hashing (see Dean et al, 100,000 Object Categories).
If you do use Bag-of-Visual-Words, then you should probably build an Inverted Index.
Have a look at Fisher Vectors for improved accuracy as compared to BOW.
Suggestion
Start by using Bag-Of-Visual-Words. There are tutorials on how to train the dictionary for this
model.
Training:
Extract Local features (just pick SIFT, you can easily change this as OpenCV is very modular) from a subset of your training images. First detect features and then extract them. There are many tutorials on the web about this.
Train Dictionary. Helpful documentation with a reference to a sample implementation in Python (opencv_source_code/samples/python2/find_obj.py)!
Compute Histogram for each training image. (Also in the BOW documentation from previous step)
Put your image descriptors from the step above into a FLANN-Based-matcher.
Querying:
Compute features on your query image.
Use the dictionary from training to build a BOW histogram for your query image.
Use that feature to find the nearest neighbor(s).
I think you are talking about Content Based Image Retrieval
There are many research paper available on Internet.Get any one of them and Implement Best out of them according to your needs.Select Criteria according to your application like Texture based,color based,shape based image retrieval (This is best when you are working with image retrieval on internet for speed).
So you Need python Implementation, I would like to suggest you to go through Chapter 7, 8 of book Computer Vision Book . It Contains Working Example with code of what you are looking for
One question you may found useful : Are there any API's that'll let me search by image?
Would OCR Software be able to reliably translate an image such as the following into a list of values?
UPDATE:
In more detail the task is as follows:
We have a client application, where the user can open a report. This report contains a table of values.
But not every report looks the same - different fonts, different spacing, different colors, maybe the report contains many tables with different number of rows/columns...
The user selects an area of the report which contains a table. Using the mouse.
Now we want to convert the selected table into values - using our OCR tool.
At the time when the user selects the rectangular area I can ask for extra information
to help with the OCR process, and ask for confirmation that the values have been correct recognised.
It will initially be an experimental project, and therefore most likely with an OpenSource OCR tool - or at least one that does not cost any money for experimental purposes.
Simple answer is YES, you should just choose right tools.
I don't know if open source can ever get close to 100% accuracy on those images, but based on the answers here probably yes, if you spend some time on training and solve table analisys problem and stuff like that.
When we talk about commertial OCR like ABBYY or other, it will provide you 99%+ accuracy out of the box and it will detect tables automatically. No training, no anything, just works. Drawback is that you have to pay for it $$. Some would object that for open source you pay your time to set it up and mantain - but everyone decides for himself here.
However if we talk about commertial tools, there is more choice actually. And it depends on what you want. Boxed products like FineReader are actually targeting on converting input documents into editable documents like Word or Excell. Since you want actually to get data, not the Word document, you may need to look into different product category - Data Capture, which is essentially OCR plus some additional logic to find necessary data on the page. In case of invoice it could be Company name, Total amount, Due Date, Line items in the table, etc.
Data Capture is complicated subject and requires some learning, but being properly used can give quaranteed accuracy when capturing data from the documents. It is using different rules for data cross-check, database lookups, etc. When necessary it may send datafor manual verification. Enterprises are widely usind Data Capture applicaitons to enter millions of documents every month and heavily rely on data extracted in their every day workflow.
And there are also OCR SDK ofcourse, that will give you API access to recognition results and you will be able to program what to do with the data.
If you describe your task in more detail I can provide you with advice what direction is easier to go.
UPDATE
So what you do is basically Data Capture application, but not fully automated, using so-called "click to index" approach. There is number of applications like that on the market: you scan images and operator clicks on the text on the image (or draws rectangle around it) and then populates fields to database. It is good approach when number of images to process is relatively small, and manual workload is not big enough to justify cost of fully automated application (yes, there are fully automated systems that can do images with different font, spacing, layout, number of rows in the tables and so on).
If you decided to develop stuff and instead of buying, then all you need here is to chose OCR SDK. All UI you are going to write yoursself, right? The big choice is to decide: open source or commercial.
Best Open source is tesseract OCR, as far as I know. It is free, but may have real problems with table analysis, but with manual zoning approach this should not be the problem. As to OCR accuracty - people are often train OCR for font to increase accuracy, but this should not be the case for you, since fonts could be different. So you can just try tesseract out and see what accuracy you will get - this will influence amount of manual work to correct it.
Commertial OCR will give higher accuracy but will cost you money. I think you should anyway take a look to see if it worth it, or tesserack is good enough for you. I think the simplest way would be to download trial version of some box OCR prouct like FineReader. You will get good idea what accuracy would be in OCR SDK then.
If you always have solid borders in your table, you can try this solution:
Locate the horizontal and vertical lines on each page (long runs of
black pixels)
Segment the image into cells using the line coordinates
Clean up each cell (remove borders, threshold to black and white)
Perform OCR on each cell
Assemble results into a 2D array
Else your document have a borderless table, you can try to follow this line:
Optical Character Recognition is pretty amazing stuff, but it isn’t
always perfect. To get the best possible results, it helps to use the
cleanest input you can. In my initial experiments, I found that
performing OCR on the entire document actually worked pretty well as
long as I removed the cell borders (long horizontal and vertical
lines). However, the software compressed all whitespace into a single
empty space. Since my input documents had multiple columns with
several words in each column, the cell boundaries were getting lost.
Retaining the relationship between cells was very important, so one
possible solution was to draw a unique character, like “^” on each
cell boundary – something the OCR would still recognize and that I
could use later to split the resulting strings.
I found all this information in this link, asking Google "OCR to table". The author published a full algorithm using Python and Tesseract, both opensource solutions!
If you want to try the Tesseract power, maybe you should try this site:
http://www.free-ocr.com/
Which OCR you are talking about?
Will you be developing codes based on that OCR or you will be using something off the shelves?
FYI:
Tesseract OCR
it has implemented the document reading executable, so you can feed the whole page in, and it will extract characters for you. It recognizes blank spaces pretty well, it might be able to help with tab-spacing.
I've been OCR'ing scanned documents since '98. This is a recurring problem for scanned docs, specially for those that include rotated and/or skewed pages.
Yes, there are several good commercial systems and some could provide, once well configured, terrific automatic data-mining rate, asking for the operator's help only for those very degraded fields. If I were you, I'd rely on some of them.
If commercial choices threat your budget, OSS can lend a hand. But, "there's no free lunch". So, you'll have to rely on a bunch of tailor-made scripts to scaffold an affordable solution to process your bunch of docs. Fortunately, you are not alone. In fact, past last decades, many people have been dealing with this. So, IMHO, the best and concise answer for this question is provided by this article:
https://datascience.blog.wzb.eu/2017/02/16/data-mining-ocr-pdfs-using-pdftabextract-to-liberate-tabular-data-from-scanned-documents/
Its reading is worth! The author offers useful tools of his own, but the article's conclusion is very important to give you a good mindset about how to solve this kind of problem.
"There is no silver bullet."
(Fred Brooks, The Mitical Man-Month)
It really depends on implementation.
There are a few parameters that affect the OCR's ability to recognize:
1. How well the OCR is trained - the size and quality of the examples database
2. How well it is trained to detect "garbage" (besides knowing what's a letter, you need to know what is NOT a letter).
3. The OCR's design and type
4. If it's a Nerural Network, the Nerural Network structure affects its ability to learn and "decide".
So, if you're not making one of your own, it's just a matter of testing different kinds until you find one that fits.
You could try other approach. With tesseract (or other OCRS) you can get coordinates for each word. Then you can try to group those words by vercital and horizontal coordinates to get rows/columns. For example to tell a difference between a white space and tab space. It takes some practice to get good results but it is possible. With this method you can detect tables even if the tables use invisible separators - no lines. The word coordinates are solid base for table recog
We also have struggled with the issue of recognizing text within tables. There are two solutions which do it out of the box, ABBYY Recognition Server and ABBYY FlexiCapture. Rec Server is a server-based, high volume OCR tool designed for conversion of large volumes of documents to a searchable format. Although it is available with an API for those types of uses we recommend FlexiCapture. FlexiCapture gives low level control over extraction of data from within table formats including automatic detection of table items on a page. It is available in a full API version without a front end, or the off the shelf version that we market. Reach out to me if you want to know more.
Here are the basic steps that have worked for me. Tools needed include Tesseract, Python, OpenCV, and ImageMagick if you need to do any rotation of images to correct skew.
Use Tesseract to detect rotation and ImageMagick mogrify to fix it.
Use OpenCV to find and extract tables.
Use OpenCV to find and extract each cell from the table.
Use OpenCV to crop and clean up each cell so that there is no noise that will confuse OCR software.
Use Tesseract to OCR each cell.
Combine the extracted text of each cell into the format you need.
The code for each of these steps is extensive, but if you want to use a python package, it's as simple as the following.
pip3 install table_ocr
python3 -m table_ocr.demo https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eihli/image-table-ocr/master/resources/test_data/simple.png
That package and demo module will turn the following table into CSV output.
Cell,Format,Formula
B4,Percentage,None
C4,General,None
D4,Accounting,None
E4,Currency,"=PMT(B4/12,C4,D4)"
F4,Currency,=E4*C4
If you need to make any changes to get the code to work for table borders with different widths, there are extensive notes at https://eihli.github.io/image-table-ocr/pdf_table_extraction_and_ocr.html
I would like to know what algorithm is used to obtain an image and get the objects present in the image and process (give information about) it. And also, how is this done?
I agree with Sid Farkus, there is no simple answer to this question.
Maybe you can get started by checking out the Open Computer Vision Library. There is a Wiki page on object detection with links to a How-To and to papers.
You may find other examples and approaches (i.e. algorithms); it's likely that the algorithms differ by application (i.e. depending on what you actually want to detect).
There are many ways to do Object Detection and it still an open problem.
You can start with template matching, It is probably the simplest way to solve, which consists of making a convolution with the known image (IA) on the new image (IB). It is a fairly simple idea because it is like applying a filter on the signal, the filter will generate a maximum point in the image when it finds the object, as shown in the video. But that technique has several cons, does not handle variants in scale or rotation so it has no real application.
Also you can find another option more robust feature matching, which consist on create a dataset with features such as SIFT, SURF or ORB of different objects with this you can train a SVM to recognize objects
You can also check deformable part models. However, The state of the art object detection is based on deep-learning such as Faster R-CNN, Alexnet, which learn the features that will be used to detect/recognize the objects
Well this is hardly an answerable question, but for most computer vision applications a good starting point is the Hough Transform