I've been reading up a bit on anti-aliasing and it seems to make sense, but there is one thing I'm not too sure of. How exactly do you find the maximum frequency of a signal (in the context of graphics).
I realize there's more than one case so I assume there is more than one answer. But first let me state a simple algorithm that I think would represent maximum frequency so someone can tell me if I'm conceptualizing it the wrong way.
Let's say it's for a 1 dimensional,finite, and greyscale image (in pixels). Am I correct in assuming you could simply scan the entire pixel line (in the spatial domain) looking for a for the minimum oscillation and the inverse of that smallest oscillation would be the maximum frequency?
Ex values {23,26,28,22,48,49,51,49}
Frequency:Pertaining to Set {}
(1/2) = .5 : {28,22}
(1/4) = .25 : {22,48,49,51}
So would .5 be the maximum frequency?
And what would be the ideal way to calculate this for a similar pixel line as the one above?
And on a more theoretical note, what if your sampling input was infinite (more like the real world)? Would a valid process be sort of like:
Predetermine a decent interval for point sampling
Determine max frequency from point sampling
while(2*maxFrequency > pointSamplingInterval)
{
pointSamplingInterval*=2
Redetermine maxFrequency from point sampling (with new interval)
}
I know these algorithms are fraught with inefficiencies, so what are some of the preferred ways? (Not looking for something crazy-optimized, just fundamentally better concepts)
The proper way to approach this is using a Fourier Transform (in practice, an FFT,or fast fourier transform)
The theory works as follows: if you have an set of pixels with color/grayscale, then we can say that the image is represented by pixels in the "spatial domain"; that is, each individual number specifies the image at a particular spatial location.
However, what we really want is a representation of the image in the "frequency domain". Instead of each individual number specifying each pixel, each number represents the amplitude of a particular frequency in the image as a whole.
The tool which converts from the "spatial domain" to the "frequency domain" is the Fourier Transform. The output of the FT will be a sequence of numbers specifying the relative contribution of different frequencies.
In order to find the maximum frequency, you perform the FT, and look at the amplitudes that you get for the high frequencies - then it is just a matter of searching from the highest frequency down until you hit your "minimum significant amplitude" threshold.
You can code your own FFT, but it is much easier in practice to use a pre-packaged library such as FFTW
You don't scan a signal for the highest frequency and then choose your sampling frequency: You choose a sampling frequency that's high enough to capture the things you want to capture, and then you filter the signal to remove high frequencies. You throw away everything higher than half the sampling rate before you sample it.
Am I correct in assuming you could
simply scan the entire pixel line (in
the spatial domain) looking for a for
the minimum oscillation and the
inverse of that smallest oscillation
would be the maximum frequency?
If you have a line of pixels, then the sampling is already done. It's too late to apply an antialiasing filter. The highest frequency that could be present is half the sampling frequency ("1/2px", I guess).
And on a more theoretical note, what
if your sampling input was infinite
(more like the real world)?
Yes, that's when you use the filter. First, you have a continuous function, like a real-life image (infinite sampling rate). Then you filter it to remove everything above fs/2, then you sample it at fs (digitize the image into pixels). Cameras don't actually do any filtering, which is why you get Moire patterns when you photograph bricks, etc.
If you're anti-aliasing computer graphics, you have to think of the ideal continuous mathematical function first, and think through how you would filter it and digitize it to produce the output on the screen.
For instance, if you want to generate a square wave with a computer, you can't just naively alternate between maximum and minimum values. That would be just like sampling a real life signal without filtering first. The higher harmonics wrap back into the baseband and cause lots of spurious spikes in the spectrum. You need to generate points as if they were sampled from a filtered continuous mathematical function:
I think this article from the O'Reilly site might also be useful to you ... http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2001/01/31/numerically.html ... in there they're referring to frequency analysis of sound files but you it gives you the idea.
I think what you need is an application of Fourier Analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_analysis). I've studied this but never used it so take it with a pinch of salt but I believe if you apply it correctly to your set of numbers you will get a set of frequencies which are components of the series and then you can pick off the highest one.
I can't point you at a piece of code that does this but I'm sure it would be out there somewhere .
Related
I have an image which may contain some blobs. The blobs can be any size, and some will yield a very strong signal, while others are very weak. In this question I will focus on the weak ones because they are the difficult ones to detect.
Here is an example with 4 blobs.
The blob at (480, 180) is the most difficult one to detect. By running a Gaussian filter followed by an opening operation increases the contrast a bit, but not a lot:
The tricky part of this problem is that the natural noise in the background will result in (many) pixels which have a stronger signal than the blob I want to detect. What makes the blob a blob is that it's either a large area with an average increase in intensity, (or a small area with a very strong increase in intensity (not relevant here)).
How can I include this spacial information in order to detect my blob?
It is obvious that I first needs to filter the image with a Gaussian and/or median filter in order to incorporate the nearby region of each pixel into each single pixel value. However, no amount of blurring is enough to make it easy to segment the blobs from the background.
EDIT: Regarding thresholding: Thresholding is very temping, but also problematic by itself. I do not have a region of "pure background" and the larger a blob is, the weaker the signal can be - while still being detectable.
I should also not that the typical image will not have any blobs at all, but just be pure background.
You could try a h-minima transform. It removes any minima under the height of h and increases the height of all other throughs by h. It's defined as the morphological reconstruction of an erosion increased by the height h. Here's the results with h = 35:
It should be a lot easier to manipulate. It also needs a input like segmentation. The difference is that this is more robust. Underestimating h by a relatively large number will only bring you back closer to the original problem image instead of failing completely.
You could try to characterize the background noise to get an estimate, assuming that whatever your application is would have a relatively constant amount of it.
Note that one blue dot between the two large bottom blobs. Even further processing is needed. You could try continuing with the morphology. Something that I have found to work in some 'ink-blot' segmentation cases like this is running through every connected component, calculating their convex hulls and finally the union of all the convex hulls in the image. It usually makes further morphological operations much easier and provides a good estimate for the label.
In my experience, if you can see your gaussian filter size (those little circles), then your filter width is too small. Although terribly expensive, try bumping up the radius on your gaussian, it should continue to improve your results up to its radius matching the radius of the smallest object you are trying to find.
Following that (heavy gaussian), I would do a peak search across the whole image. Cut out any peaks that are too low, and or have too little contrast to the nearest valley/ background.
Don't be afraid to split this into two isolated processing pipelines: ie one filtration and extraction for low contrast spread out blobs, and a completely different one to isolate high contrast spikes (much much easier to find). That being said, a high contrast spike "should" survive even a pretty aggressive filter. Another thing to keep in mind is iterative subtraction, if there are some blobs that can be found easily from the get go, pull them out of the image and then do a stretch (but be careful as you can make the image be whatever you want it to be with too much stretching)
Maybe try an iterative approach using thresholding and edge detection:
Start with a very high threshold (say 90% signal), then run a canny filter (or any binary edge filter you like) on the thresholded image. Count and store the number of pixels (edge pixels) generated.
Proceed to repeat this step for lower and lower thresholds. At a certain point you are going to see a massive spike in edges detected (ie your cool textured background). Then pull back the threshold a little higher and run closing and floodfill on your resulting edge image.
I'm working on a project in which a rod is attached at one end to a rotating shaft. So, as the shaft rotates from 0 to ~100 degrees back-and-forth (in the xy plane), so does the rod. I mounted a 3-axis accelerometer at the end of the moving rod, and I measured the distance of the accelerometer from the center of rotation (i.e., the length of the rod) to be about 38 cm. I have collected a lot of data, but I'm in need of help to find the best method to filter it. First, here's a plot of the raw data:
I think the data makes sense: if it's ramping up, then then I think at that point the acceleration should be linearly increasing, and then when it's ramping down, it should linearly decrease. If its moving constantly, the acceleration will be ~zero. Keep in mind though that sometimes the speed changes (is higher) from one "trial" to the other. In this case, there were ~120 "trials" or movements/sweeps, data sampled at 148 Hz.
For filtering, I've tried a low pass filter and then an exponentially decreasing moving average, and both plots weren't too hot. And although I'm not good at interpreting these: here is what I got when coding a power frequency plot:
What I was hoping to get help with here is, attain a really good method by which I can filter this data. The one thing that keeps coming up again time and time again (especially on this site) is the Kalman filter. While there's lots of code online that helps implementing these in MATLAB, I haven't been able to actually understand it that great, and therefore neglect to include my work on it here. So, is a kalman filter appropriate here, for rotational acceleration? If so, can someone help me implement one in matlab and interpret it? Is there something I'm not seeing that may be just as good/better that is relatively simple?
Here's the data I'm talking about. Looking at it more closely/zooming in gives a better appreciation for what's going on in the movement, I think:
http://cl.ly/433B1h3m1L0t?_ga=1.81885205.2093327149.1426657579
Edit: OK, here is the plot of both relavent dimensions collected from the accelerometer. I am neglecting to include the up and down dimension as the accelerometer shows a near constant ~1 G, so I think its safe to say its not capturing much rotational motion. Red is what I believe is the centripetal component, and blue is tangential. I have no idea how to combine them though, which is why I (maybe wrongfully?) ignored it in my post.
And here is the data for the other dimension:
http://cl.ly/1u133033182V?_ga=1.74069905.2093327149.1426657579
Forget the Kalman filter, see the note at the end of the answer for the reason why.
Using a simple moving average filter (like I showed you on an earlier reply if i recall) which is in essence a low-pass filter :
n = 30 ; %// length of the filter
kernel = ones(1,n)./n ;
ysm = filter( kernel , 1 , flipud(filter( kernel , 1 , flipud(y) )) ) ;
%// assuming your data "y" are in COLUMN (otherwise change 'flipud' to 'fliplr')
note: if you have access to the curvefit toolbox, you can simply use: ys = smooth(y,30) ; to get nearly the same result.
I get:
which once zoomed look like:
You can play with the parameter n to increase or decrease the smoothing.
The gray signal is your original signal. I strongly suspect that the noise spikes you are getting are just due to the vibrations of your rod. (depending on the ratio length/cross section of your rod, you can get significant vibrations at the end of your 38 cm rod. These vibrations will take the shape of oscillations around the main carrier signal, which definitely look like what I am seeing in your signal).
Note:
The Kalman filter is way overkill to do a simple filtering of noisy data. Kalman filter is used when you want to calculate a value (a position if I follow your example) based on some noisy measurement, but to refine the calculations, the Kalman filter will also use a prediction of the position based on the previous state (position) and the inertial data (how fast you were rotating for example). For that prediction you need a "model" of the behavior of your system, which you do not seem to have.
In your case, you would need to calculate the acceleration seen by the accelerometer based on the (known or theoretical) rotation speed of the shaft at any point of time, the distance of the accell to the center of rotation, and probably to make it more precise, a dynamic model of the main vibration modes of your rod. Then for each step, compare that to the actual measurement... seems a bit heavy for your case.
Look at the quick figure explaining the Kalman filter process in this wikipedia entry : Kalman filter, and read on if you want to understand it more.
I will propose for you low-pass filter, but ordinary first-order inertial model instead of Kalman. I designed filter with pass-band till 10 Hz (~~0,1 of your sample frequency). Discrete model has following equation:
y[k] = 0.9418*y[k-1] + 0.05824*u[k-1]
where u is your measured vector, and y is vector after filtering. This equation starts at sample number 1, so you can just assign 0 to the sample number 0.
Not sure if this may or may not be valid here on SO, but I was hoping someone can advise of the correct algorithm to use.
I have the following RAW data.
In the image you can see "steps". Essentially I wish to get these steps, but then get a moving average of all the data between. In the following image, you can see the moving average:
However you will notice that at the "steps", the moving average decreases the gradient where I wish to keep the high vertical gradient.
Is there any smoothing technique that will take into account a large vertical "offset", but smooth the other data?
Yup, I had to do something similar with images from a spacecraft.
Simple technique #1: use a median filter with a modest width - say about 5 samples, or 7. This provides an output value that is the median of the corresponding input value and several of its immediate neighbors on either side. It will get rid of those spikes, and do a good job preserving the step edges.
The median filter is provided in all number-crunching toolkits that I know of such as Matlab, Python/Numpy, IDL etc., and libraries for compiled languages such as C++, Java (though specific names don't come to mind right now...)
Technique #2, perhaps not quite as good: Use a Savitzky-Golay smoothing filter. This works by effectively making least-square polynomial fits to the data, at each output sample, using the corresponding input sample and a neighborhood of points (much like the median filter). The SG smoother is known for being fairly good at preserving peaks and sharp transistions.
The SG filter is usually provided by most signal processing and number crunching packages, but might not be as common as the median filter.
Technique #3, the most work and requiring the most experience and judgement: Go ahead and use a smoother - moving box average, Gaussian, whatever - but then create an output that blends between the original with the smoothed data. The blend, controlled by a new data series you create, varies from all-original (blending in 0% of the smoothed) to all-smoothed (100%).
To control the blending, start with an edge detector to detect the jumps. You may want to first median-filter the data to get rid of the spikes. Then broaden (dilation in image processing jargon) or smooth and renormalize the the edge detector's output, and flip it around so it gives 0.0 at and near the jumps, and 1.0 everywhere else. Perhaps you want a smooth transition joining them. It is an art to get this right, which depends on how the data will be used - for me, it's usually images to be viewed by Humans. An automated embedded control system might work best if tweaked differently.
The main advantage of this technique is you can plug in whatever kind of smoothing filter you like. It won't have any effect where the blend control value is zero. The main disadvantage is that the jumps, the small neighborhood defined by the manipulated edge detector output, will contain noise.
I recommend first detecting the steps and then smoothing each step individually.
You know how to do the smoothing, and edge/step detection is pretty easy also (see here, for example). A typical edge detection scheme is to smooth your data and then multiply/convolute/cross-corelate it with some filter (for example the array [-1,1] that will show you where the steps are). In a mathematical context this can be viewed as studying the derivative of your plot to find inflection points (for some of the filters).
An alternative "hackish" solution would be to do a moving average but exclude outliers from the smoothing. You can decide what an outlier is by using some threshold t. In other words, for each point p with value v, take x points surrounding it and find the subset of those points which are between v - t and v + t, and take the average of these points as the new value of p.
I'm writing an application that averages/combines/stacks a series of exposures. This is commonly used to reduce noise in the resultant image.
However, it seems, to optimize the average/stack the exposures are usually first normalized. It seems that this process assigns weights to each of the exposures and then proceeds to combine them. I am guessing that the process computes the overall intensity of each image as the purpose is to match the intensities of all the images in the stack.
My question is, how can I incorporate an algorithm that will allow me to normalize a series of images? I guess the question be generalized by instead asking "How can I normalize a series of readings?"
An outline in my head appears as follows:
Compute the average of a reference image.
Divide the average of each frame by the average of the the reference frame.
The result of each division is the weight for each frame.
Scale/Multiply each pixel in a frame by the weight found for that particular frame.
Does this seem to make sense to anyone? I have tried to google for the past hour but didn't found anything. Also took at the indices of various image processing books on Amazon but that didn't turn up anything either.
Each integration consists of signal and assorted noise - some is time-independent (e.g. bias or CCD readout noise), some time-dependent (e.g dark current), and some is random (shot noise). The aim is to remove the noise, and leave the signal. So you would first subtract the 'fixed' sources using dark frames (which will include dark current, readout and bias) leaving signal plus shot noise. Signal scales as flux times exposure time, shot noise as the square root of the signal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_noise
so overall your signal/noise scales as the square root of the integration time (assuming your integrations are short enough that they are not saturated). So by adding frames you are simply increasing the exposure time, and hence the signal/noise ratio. You don't need to normalize first.
To complicate matters, transient non-Gaussian noise is also present (e.g. cosmic ray hits). There are many techniques for dealing with these, but a common one is 'sigma-clipping', where you have an extra pass to calculate the mean and standard deviation of each pixel, and then reject outliers that are many standard deviations from the mean. Real signal will show Gaussian fluctuations around the mean value, whereas transients will show a large deviation in one frame of the stack. Maybe that's what you are thinking of?
How do I segment a 2D image into blobs of similar values efficiently? The given input is a n array of integer, which includes hue for non-gray pixels and brightness of gray pixels.
I am writing a virtual mobile robot using Java, and I am using segmentation to analyze the map and also the image from the camera. This is a well-known problem in Computer Vision, but when it's on a robot performance does matter so I wanted some inputs. Algorithm is what matters, so you can post code in any language.
Wikipedia article: Segmentation (image processing)
[PPT] Stanford CS-223-B Lecture 11 Segmentation and Grouping (which says Mean Shift is perhaps the best technique to date)
Mean Shift Pictures (paper is also available from Dorin Comaniciu)
I would downsample,in colourspace and in number of pixels, use a vision method(probably meanshift) and upscale the result.
This is good because downsampling also increases the robustness to noise, and makes it more likely that you get meaningful segments.
You could use floodfill to smooth edges afterwards if you need smoothness.
Some more thoughts (in response to your comment).
1) Did you blend as you downsampled? y[i]=(x[2i]+x[2i+1])/2 This should eliminate noise.
2)How fast do you want it to be?
3)Have you tried dynamic meanshift?(also google for dynamic x for all algorithms x)
Not sure if it is too efficient, but you could try using a Kohonen neural network (or, self-organizing map; SOM) to group the similar values, where each pixel contains the original color and position and only the color is used for the Kohohen grouping.
You should read up before you implement this though, as my knowledge of the Kohonen network goes as far as that it is used for grouping data - so I don't know what the performance/viability options are for your scenario.
There are also Hopfield Networks. They can be mangled into grouping from what I read.
What I have now:
Make a buffer of the same size as the input image, initialized to UNSEGMENTED.
For each pixel in the image where the corresponding buffer value is not UNSEGMENTED, flood the buffer using the pixel value.
a. The border checking of the flooding is done by checking if pixel is within EPSILON (currently set to 10) of the originating pixel's value.
b. Flood filling algorithm.
Possible issue:
The 2.a.'s border checking is called many times in the flood filling algorithm. I could turn it into a lookup if I could precalculate the border using edge detection, but that may add more time than current check.
private boolean isValuesCloseEnough(int a_lhs, int a_rhs) {
return Math.abs(a_lhs - a_rhs) <= EPSILON;
}
Possible Enhancement:
Instead of checking every single pixel for UNSEGMENTED, I could randomly pick a few points. If you are expecting around 10 blobs, picking random points in that order may suffice. Drawback is that you might miss a useful but small blob.
Check out Eyepatch (eyepatch.stanford.edu). It should help you during the investigation phase by providing a variety of possible filters for segmentation.
An alternative to flood-fill is the connnected-components algorithm. So,
Cheaply classify your pixels. e.g. divide pixels in colour space.
Run the cc to find the blobs
Retain the blobs of significant size
This approach is widely used in early vision approaches. For example in the seminal paper "Blobworld: A System for Region-Based Image Indexing and Retrieval".