How a robust background removal is implemented? - tensorflow

I found that a deep-learning-based method (e.g., 1) is much more robust than a non-deep-learning-based method (e.g., 2, using OpenCV).
https://www.remove.bg
How do I remove the background from this kind of image?
In the OpenCV example, Canny is used to detect the edges. But this step can be very sensitive to the image. The contour detection may end up with wrong contours. It is also difficult to determine which contours should be kept.
How a robust deep-learning method is implemented? Is any good example code? Thanks.

For that to work you need to use Unet. You can search for that on github.
Unet transofrm is: I->I.
Space of the image will become image (of same or similar size).
You need to have say 10.000 images with bg removed. People, (long hair people), cats, cars, shoes, T-shirts, etc.
So you set different backgrounds on all these images as source and prediction should be images with removed background.
You can also do a segmentation model and when you find the foreground you can remove the bg.

Related

Creating an ML-Model that detects card-values

This is a more generic question about training an ML-Model to detect cards.
The cards are a kid's game, 4 different colors, numbers and symbols. I don't need to detect the color, just the value (a.k.a symbol) of the cards.
I tried to take pictures with my iPhone of every card, used RectLabel to draw the rectangles around the symbols in the upper left corner (the cards have an upside down-symbol in the lower right corner, too, I didn't mark these as they'll be hidden during detection).
I cropped the images so only the card is visible, no surroundings.
Then I uploaded my images to app.roboflow.ai and let them do their magic (using Auto-Orient, Resize to 416x416, Grayscale, Auto-Adjust Contrast, Rotation, Shear, Blur and Noise).
That gave me another set of images which I used to train my model with CreateML from Apple.
However, when I use that model in my app (I'm using the Breakfast Finder Demo from Apple), the cards values aren't detected - well, sometimes it works, but only at a certain distance from the phone and the labels are either upside down or sideways.
My guess is this is because my images aren't taken the way they should be?
Any hints on how I'd have to set this whole thing up so my model gets trained well?
My bet would be on this being the problem:
I cropped the images so only the card is visible, no surroundings
You want your training images to be as similar as possible to the images your model will see in the wild. If it's trained only on images of cards with no surroundings and then you show it images of cards with things around them it won't know what to do.
This UNO scoring example is extremely similar to your problem and might provide some ideas and guidance.

Train Model with same image in diferents orientation

It is a good a idea to train the model with the same images , but with diferents orientations? I a have a small set of images for the training thats the reason why Im trying to cover all the mobile camera-gallery user scenarios.
For example, the image: example.png with 3 copies; example90.png, example180.png and example.270.png with their diferents rotations. And also with diferents background colors, shadows, etc.
By the way, my test is to identify the type of animal.
Is that a good idea??
If you use Core ML with the Vision framework (and you probably should), Vision will automatically rotate the image so that "up" is really up. In that case it doesn't matter how the user held their camera when they took the picture (assuming the picture still has the EXIF data that describes its orientation).

TensorFlow: Collecting my own training data set & Using that training dataset to find the location of object

I'm trying to collect my own training data set for the image detection (Recognition, yet). Right now, I have 4 classes and 750 images for each. Each images are just regular images of the each classes; however, some of images are blur or contain outside objects such as, different background or other factors (but nothing distinguishable stuff). Using that training data set, image recognition is really bad.
My question is,
1. Does the training image set needs to contain the object in various background/setting/environment (I believe not...)?
2. Lets just say training worked fairly accurately and I want to know the location of the object on the image. I figure there is no way I can find the location just using the image recognition, so if I use the bounding box, how/where in the code can I see the location of the bounding box?
Thank you in advance!
It is difficult to know in advance what features your programm will learn for each class. But then again, if your unseen images will be in the same background, the background will play no role. I would suggest data augmentation in training; randomly color distortion, random flipping, random cropping.
You can't see in the code where the bounding box is. You have to label/annotate them yourself first in your collected data, using a tool as LabelMe for example. Then comes learning the object detector.

How to detect street name plates

I have some problems with this assignment. Given an image of a street nameplate, like this one
I have to detect the nameplate and mark it on the image with a rectangle, obtaining something like this:
Nameplates can be rotated, scaled and in different lighting conditions. The procedure must be automatic.
What i have tried so far is to isolate the nameplate from the background. I've tried with different thresholding methods, but the problem is that i have different images and one single method doesn't work with all of them, due to different lighting condition and noise. What i've thought is to perform a pre-processing on the images, to reduce noise and normalize light, but, again, how to choose pre-processing steps that work with every image in my dataset? And what for images that don't need pre-processing?
Another problem is that there might be other signs in the image with writings on them and i have to ignore them. So i've thought i could isolate the nameplate by that blue outline, but i don't know if that can be done(or if it is convenient) with template matching, also considering that part of the outline could be cut off from the image.
So what i'm asking is: is there an automatic way to isolate/detect only that type of nameplates that have the blue outline on them, regardless of orientation, light conditions, shadows on them, noise in the image, etc? What steps would you follow?
Thank You

Finding significant images in a set of surveillance camera images

I've had theft problems outside my house so I setup a simple webcam to capture every second with Dorgem (http://dorgem.sf.net).
Dorgem does offer a feature to use motion detection to only capture frames where something is moving on the screen. The problem is that the motion detection algorithm it uses is extremely sensitive. It goes off because of variations in color between successive shots on my cheap webcam, and it also goes off because the trees in front of the house are blowing in the wind. Additionally, the front of my house is a high traffic area so there is also a large number of legitimately captured frames.
I average capturing 2800/3600 frames every second using Dorgem's motion detection. This is too much for me to search through to find out where the interesting activity is.
I wish I could re-position the camera to a more optimal position where it would only capture the areas I'm interested in, so that motion detection would be simpler, however this is not an option for me.
I think that because my camera has a fixed position and each picture frames the same area in front of my house, then I should be able to scan the images and figure out which ones have motion in some interesting region of that image, throwing out all other frames.
For example: if there's a change in pixel 320,240 then someone has stepped in front of my house and I want to see that frame, but if there's a change in pixel 1,1 then its just the trees blowing in the wind and the frame can be discarded.
I've looked at pdiff, a tool for finding diffs in sets of pictures, but it seems to be also focused on diffing the entire picture, rather than a specific region of it:
http://pdiff.sourceforge.net/
I've also looked at phash, a tool for calculating a hash based on human perception of an image, but it seems too complex:
http://www.phash.org/
I suppose I could implement it in a shell script using imagemagick's mogrify -crop to cherry pick the regions of the image I'm interested in, then running pdiff to find the interesting ones, and using that to pick out the interesting frames.
Any thoughts? ideas? existing tools?
cropping and then using pdiff seems like the best choice to me.