EMGUCV shape matching for desktop images - vb.net

in a commercial application (based on opencvsharp) i've seen a feature "Shape-Matching".
i like to know how this works and struggling with it since two weeks.
Functionality is to define a area on the screen (e.g. Chrome-Logo / Excel-Logo) - generate shapes from
this image and then search in the whole screen-image (also as shapes ...) for it.
(i know Template and Homographic are great for this but this is like a challenge to do via shapes!)
the first try was to:
' load image
Dim IMG = New Image(Of BGR, Byte)("Excel.jpg")
' optional scale
IMG = IMG.Resize(2, Linear)
' optional deblur (Multiple Methods tested: Gaussian, Median, ...)
' do canny-thresholding
IMG = IMG.Canny(75, 50)
' do thinning
XImgproc.XImgprocInvoke.Thinning(IMG, IMG, GuoHall)
' do Contour detection
CvInvoke.FindContours(IMG, contours, h, List, ChainApproxSimple)
' Optional do ApproxPolyDP
' Iterate all Contours of the Logo to find in the whole screen-image.
Dim distance = CvInvoke.MatchShapes(contours(i), contours2(i2), L2)
This works all fine for easy cases ... but not for such logos
The problems
Shape detection in general seems to be optimized to search for very simple objects like lines and
objects with very less shape points. (also YouTube and Google shows only shows such simple 'Outline,Stopsign,Coin' examples). But i know it can work (and very fast)...
The Search Criteria can have more than one shapes - and each shape can have more then 100 points. In some tests the detection of the logo was not consistent between 2 exact same logos in the source image - even if the shapes "looks" the same (size, rotation, shape) - i think the amount of points was the problem here ...
The Shape-match will find each part of the image (like X or a) in the CSV-Excel-Logo somewhere in the whole screen-image. but all the shapes needs to be close together. For sure it can be possible that one shape is fully closed and contains another shape which can be accessed over the result tree - but ...
there is no exact case/logo - it can be anything on the screen - in any size and form.
If the Shapes are found - and close together e.g. the "X and a" from the Excel-Logo should remain exactly/nearly in this order - and Shape detection should be always scale and rotational invariant ...
Hopefully you have some suggestions how such a shape-matching can be accomplished
Tests
Tested to optimize Shape_generation via Scaling (Factor 2 gives better results - downscale is bad ...)
(in some cases the open pixels will be closed then ...)
Blurring and Morphological operations mostly tends to less accurate results in my case.
Histogram_EQ cannot be applied on 2 different images the same way. complete avoid this!
tried matching algorithms like hough-transform but my results are really bad in all my cases.

Related

Simple Captcha Solving

I'm trying to solve some simple captcha using OpenCV and pytesseract. Some of captcha samples are:
I tried to the remove the noisy dots with some filters:
import cv2
import numpy as np
import pytesseract
img = cv2.imread(image_path)
_, img = cv2.threshold(img, 127, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
img = cv2.morphologyEx(img, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, np.ones((4, 4), np.uint8), iterations=1)
img = cv2.medianBlur(img, 3)
img = cv2.medianBlur(img, 3)
img = cv2.medianBlur(img, 3)
img = cv2.medianBlur(img, 3)
img = cv2.GaussianBlur(img, (5, 5), 0)
cv2.imwrite('res.png', img)
print(pytesseract.image_to_string('res.png'))
Resulting tranformed images are:
Unfortunately pytesseract just recognizes first captcha correctly. Any other better transformation?
Final Update:
As #Neil suggested, I tried to remove noise by detecting connected pixels. To find connected pixels, I found a function named connectedComponentsWithStats, whichs detect connected pixels and assigns group (component) a label. By finding connected components and removing the ones with small number of pixels, I managed to get better overall detection accuracy with pytesseract.
And here are the new resulting images:
I've taken a much more direct approach to filtering ink splotches from pdf documents. I won't share the whole thing it's a lot of code, but here is the general strategy I adopted:
Use Python Pillow library to get an image object where you can manipulate pixels directly.
Binarize the image.
Find all connected pixels and how many pixels are in each group of connected pixels. You can do this using the minesweeper algorithm. Which is easy to search for.
Set some threshold value of pixels that all legitimate letters are expected to have. This will be dependent on your image resolution.
replace all black pixels in groups below the threshold with white pixels.
Convert back to image.
Your final output image is too blurry. To enhance the performance of pytesseract you need to sharpen it.
Sharpening is not as easy as blurring, but there exist a few code snippets / tutorials (e.g. http://datahacker.rs/004-how-to-smooth-and-sharpen-an-image-in-opencv/).
Rather than chaining blurs, blur once either using Gaussian or Median Blur, experiment with parameters to get the blur amount you need, perhaps try one method after the other but there is no reason to chain blurs of the same method.
There is an OCR example in python that detect the characters. Save several images and apply the filter and train a SVM algorithm. that may help you. I did trained a algorithm with even few Images but the results were acceptable. Check this link.
Wish you luck
I know the post is a bit old but I suggest you to try this library I've developed some time ago. If you have a set of labelled captchas that service would fit you. Take a look: https://github.com/punkerpunker/captcha_solver
In README there is a section "Train model on external data" that you might be interested in.

Implement CVAE for a single image

I have a multi-dimensional, hyper-spectral image (channels, width, height = 15, 2500, 2500). I want to compress its 15 channel dimensions into 5 channels.So, the output would be (channels, width, height = 5, 2500, 2500). One simple way to do is to apply PCA. However, performance is not so good. Thus, I want to use Variational AutoEncoder(VAE).
When I saw the available solution in Tensorflow or keras library, it shows an example of clustering the whole images using Convolutional Variational AutoEncoder(CVAE).
https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/generative/cvae
https://keras.io/examples/generative/vae/
However, I have a single image. What is the best practice to implement CVAE? Is it by generating sample images by moving window approach?
One way of doing it would be to have a CVAE that takes as input (and output) values of all the spectral features for each of the spatial coordinates (the stacks circled in red in the picture). So, in the case of your image, you would have 2500*2500 = 6250000 input data samples, which are all vectors of length 15. And then the dimension of the middle layer would be a vector of length 5. And, instead of 2D convolutions that are normally used along the spatial domain of images, in this case it would make sense to use 1D convolution over the spectral domain (since the values of neighbouring wavelengths are also correlated). But I think using only fully-connected layers would also make sense.
As a disclaimer, I haven’t seen CVAEs used in this way before, but like this, you would also get many data samples, which is needed in order for the learning generalise well.
Another option would be indeed what you suggested -- to just generate the samples (patches) using a moving window (maybe with a stride that is the half size of the patch). Even though you wouldn't necessarily get enough data samples for the CVAE to generalise really well on all HSI images, I guess it doesn't matter (if it overfits), since you want to use it on that same image.

TensorFlow Object Detection API: evaluation mAP behaves weirdly?

I am training an object detector for my own data using Tensorflow Object Detection API. I am following the (great) tutorial by Dat Tran https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-train-your-own-object-detector-with-tensorflows-object-detector-api-bec72ecfe1d9. I am using the provided ssd_mobilenet_v1_coco-model pre-trained model checkpoint as the starting point for the training. I have only one object class.
I exported the trained model, ran it on the evaluation data and looked at the resulted bounding boxes. The trained model worked nicely; I would say that if there was 20 objects, typically there were 13 objects with spot on predicted bounding boxes ("true positives"); 7 where the objects were not detected ("false negatives"); 2 cases where problems occur were two or more objects are close to each other: the bounding boxes get drawn between the objects in some of these cases ("false positives"<-of course, calling these "false positives" etc. is inaccurate, but this is just for me to understand the concept of precision here). There are almost no other "false positives". This seems much better result than what I was hoping to get, and while this kind of visual inspection does not give the actual mAP (which is calculated based on overlap of the predicted and tagged bounding boxes?), I would roughly estimate the mAP as something like 13/(13+2) >80%.
However, when I run the evaluation (eval.py) (on two different evaluation sets), I get the following mAP graph (0.7 smoothed):
mAP during training
This would indicate a huge variation in mAP, and level of about 0.3 at the end of the training, which is way worse than what I would assume based on how well the boundary boxes are drawn when I use the exported output_inference_graph.pb on the evaluation set.
Here is the total loss graph for the training:
total loss during training
My training data consist of 200 images with about 20 labeled objects each (I labeled them using the labelImg app); the images are extracted from a video and the objects are small and kind of blurry. The original image size is 1200x900, so I reduced it to 600x450 for the training data. Evaluation data (which I used both as the evaluation data set for eval.pyand to visually check what the predictions look like) is similar, consists of 50 images with 20 object each, but is still in the original size (the training data is extracted from the first 30 min of the video and evaluation data from the last 30 min).
Question 1: Why is the mAP so low in evaluation when the model appears to work so well? Is it normal for the mAP graph fluctuate so much? I did not touch the default values for how many images the tensorboard uses to draw the graph (I read this question: Tensorflow object detection api validation data size and have some vague idea that there is some default value that can be changed?)
Question 2: Can this be related to different size of the training data and the evaluation data (1200x700 vs 600x450)? If so, should I resize the evaluation data, too? (I did not want to do this as my application uses the original image size, and I want to evaluate how well the model does on that data).
Question 3: Is it a problem to form the training and evaluation data from images where there are multiple tagged objects per image (i.e. surely the evaluation routine compares all the predicted bounding boxes in one image to all the tagged bounding boxes in one image, and not all the predicted boxes in one image to one tagged box which would preduce many "false false positives"?)
(Question 4: it seems to me the model training could have been stopped after around 10000 timesteps were the mAP kind of leveled out, is it now overtrained? it's kind of hard to tell when it fluctuates so much.)
I am a newbie with object detection so I very much appreciate any insight anyone can offer! :)
Question 1: This is the tough one... First, I think you don't understand correctly what mAP is, since your rough calculation is false. Here is, briefly, how it is computed:
For each class of object, using the overlap between the real objects and the detected ones, the detections are tagged as "True positive" or "False positive"; all the real objects with no "True positive" associated to them are labelled "False Negative".
Then, iterate through all your detections (on all images of the dataset) in decreasing order of confidence. Compute the accuracy (TP/(TP+FP)) and recall (TP/(TP+FN)), only counting the detections that you've already seen ( with confidence bigger than the current one) for TP and FP. This gives you a point (acc, recc), that you can put on a precision-recall graph.
Once you've added all possible points to your graph, you compute the area under the curve: this is the Average Precision for this category
if you have multiple categories, the mAP is the standard mean of all APs.
Applying that to your case: in the best case your true positive are the detections with the best confidence. In that case your acc/rec curve will look like a rectangle: you'd have 100% accuracy up to (13/20) recall, and then points with 13/20 recall and <100% accuracy; this gives you mAP=AP(category 1)=13/20=0.65. And this is the best case, you can expect less in practice due to false positives which higher confidence.
Other reasons why yours could be lower:
maybe among the bounding boxes that appear to be good, some are still rejected in the calculations because the overlap between the detection and the real object is not quite big enough. The criterion is that Intersection over Union (IoU) of the two bounding boxes (real one and detection) should be over 0.5. While it seems like a gentle threshold, it's not really; you should probably try and write a script to display the detected bounding boxes with a different color depending on whether they're accepted or not (if not, you'll get both a FP and a FN).
maybe you're only visualizing the first 10 images of the evaluation. If so, change that, for 2 reasons: 1. maybe you're just very lucky on these images, and they're not representative of what follows, just by luck. 2. Actually, more than luck, if these images are the first from the evaluation set, they come right after the end of the training set in your video, so they are probably quite similar to some images in the training set, so they are easier to predict, so they're not representative of your evaluation set.
Question 2: if you have not changed that part in the config file mobilenet_v1_coco-model, all your images (both for training and testing) are rescaled to 300x300 pixels at the start of the network, so your preprocessings don't matter.
Question 3: no it's not a problem at all, all these algorithms were designed to detect multiple objects in images.
Question 4: Given the fluctuations, I'd actually keep training it until you can see improvement or clear overtraining. 10k steps is actually quite small, maybe it's enough because your task is relatively easy, maybe it's not enough and you need to wait ten times that to have significant improvement...

face alignment algorithm on images

How can I do a basic face alignment on a 2-dimensional image with the assumption that I have the position/coordinates of the mouth and eyes.
Is there any algorithm that I could implement to correct the face alignment on images?
Face (or image) alignment refers to aligning one image (or face in your case) with respect to another (or a reference image/face). It is also referred to as image registration. You can do that using either appearance (intensity-based registration) or key-point locations (feature-based registration). The second category stems from image motion models where one image is considered a displaced version of the other.
In your case the landmark locations (3 points for eyes and nose?) provide a good reference set for straightforward feature-based registration. Assuming you have the location of a set of points in both of the 2D images, x_1 and x_2 you can estimate a similarity transform (rotation, translation, scaling), i.e. a planar 2D transform S that maps x_1 to x_2. You can additionally add reflection to that, though for faces this will most-likely be unnecessary.
Estimation can be done by forming the normal equations and solving a linear least-squares (LS) problem for the x_1 = Sx_2 system using linear regression. For the 5 unknown parameters (2 rotation, 2 translation, 1 scaling) you will need 3 points (2.5 to be precise) for solving 5 equations. Solution to the above LS can be obtained through Direct Linear Transform (e.g. by applying SVD or a matrix pseudo-inverse). For cases of a sufficiently large number of reference points (i.e. automatically detected) a RANSAC-type method for point filtering and uncertainty removal (though this is not your case here).
After estimating S, apply image warping on the second image to get the transformed grid (pixel) coordinates of the entire image 2. The transform will change pixel locations but not their appearance. Unavoidably some of the transformed regions of image 2 will lie outside the grid of image 1, and you can decide on the values for those null locations (e.g. 0, NaN etc.).
For more details: R. Szeliski, "Image Alignment and Stitching: A Tutorial" (Section 4.3 "Geometric Registration")
In OpenCV see: Geometric Image Transformations, e.g. cv::getRotationMatrix2D cv::getAffineTransform and cv::warpAffine. Note though that you should estimate and apply a similarity transform (special case of an affine) in order to preserve angles and shapes.
For the face there is lot of variability in feature points. So it won't be possible to do a perfect fit of all feature points by just affine transforms. The only way to align all the points perfectly is to warp the image given the points. Basically you can do a triangulation of image given the points and do a affine warp of each triangle to get the warped image where all the points are aligned.
Face detection could be handled based on the just eye positions.
Herein, OpenCV, Dlib and MTCNN offers to detect faces and eyes. Besides, it is a python based framework but deepface wraps those methods and offers an out-of-the box detection and alignment function.
detectFace function applies detection and alignment in the background respectively.
#!pip install deepface
from deepface import DeepFace
backends = ['opencv', 'ssd', 'dlib', 'mtcnn']
DeepFace.detectFace("img.jpg", detector_backend = backends[0])
Besides, you can apply detection and alignment manually.
from deepface.commons import functions
img = functions.load_image("img.jpg")
backends = ['opencv', 'ssd', 'dlib', 'mtcnn']
detected_face = functions.detect_face(img = img, detector_backend = backends[3])
plt.imshow(detected_face)
aligned_face = functions.align_face(img = img, detector_backend = backends[3])
plt.imshow(aligned_face)
processed_img = functions.detect_face(img = aligned_face, detector_backend = backends[3])
plt.imshow(processed_img)
There's a section Aligning Face Images in OpenCV's Face Recognition guide:
http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/modules/contrib/doc/facerec/facerec_tutorial.html#aligning-face-images
The script aligns given images at the eyes. It's written in Python, but should be easy to translate to other languages. I know of a C# implementation by Sorin Miron:
http://code.google.com/p/stereo-face-recognition/

Comparing two images - Detect egg in a nest

I have a webcam directly over a chicken nest. This camera takes images and uploads them to a folder on a server. I'd like to detect if an egg has been laid from this image.
I'm thinking the best method would be to compare the contrast as the egg will be much more reflective than the straw nest. (The camera has Infrared so the image is partly grey scale)
I'd like to do this in .NET if possible.
Try to resize your image to a smaller size, maybe 10 x 10 pixel. This averages out any small disturbing details.
Const N As Integer = 10
Dim newImage As New Bitmap(N, N)
Dim fromCamera As Image = Nothing ' Get image from camera here
Using gr As Graphics = Graphics.FromImage(newImage)
gr.SmoothingMode = SmoothingMode.HighSpeed
gr.InterpolationMode = InterpolationMode.Bilinear
gr.PixelOffsetMode = PixelOffsetMode.HighSpeed
gr.DrawImage(fromCamera, New Rectangle(0, 0, N, N))
End Using
Note: you do not need a high quality, but you need a good averaging. Maybe you will have to test different quality settings.
Since now, a pixel covers a large area of your original image, a bright pixel is very likely part of an egg. It might also be a good idea to compare the brightness of the brightest pixel to the average image brightness, since that would reduce problems due to global illumination changes.
EDIT (in response to comment):
Your code is well structured and makes sense. Here some thoughts:
Calculate the gray value from the color value with:
Dim grayValue = c.R * 0.3 + c.G * 0.59 + c.B * 0.11
... instead of comparing the three color components separately. The different weights are due to the fact, that we perceive green stronger than red and red stronger than blue. Again, we do not want a beautiful thumbnail we want a good contrast. Therefore, you might want to do some experiments here as well. May be it is sufficient to use only the red component. Dependent on lighting conditions one color component might yield a better contrast than others. I would recommend, to make the gray conversion part of the thumbnail creation and to write the thumbnails to a file or to the screen. This would allow you to play with the different settings (size of the thumbnail, resizing parameters, color to gray conversion, etc.) and to compare the (intermediate) results visually. Creating a bitmap (bmp) with the (end-)result is a very good idea.
The Using statement does the Dispose() for you. It does it even if an exception should occur before End Using (There is a hidden Try Finally involved).