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Skewing text - How to take advantage of existing edges

I have the following JPG image. If I want to find the edges where the white page meets the black background. So I can rotate the contents a few degrees clockwise. My aim is to straighten the text for using with Tesseract OCR conversion. I don't see the need to rotate the text blocks as I have seen in similar examples.
In the docs Canny Edge Detection the third arg 200 eg edges = cv.Canny(img,100,200) is maxVal and said to be 'sure to be edges'. Is there anyway to determine these (max/min) values ahead of any trial & error approach?
I have used code examples which utilize the Python cv2 module. But the edge detection is set up for simpler applications.
Is there any approach I can use to take the text out of the equation. For example: only detecting edge lines greater than a specified length?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Below is an example of edge detection (above image same min/max values) The outer edge of the page is clearly defined. The image is high contrast b/w. It has even lighting. I can't see a need for the use of an adaptive threshold. Simple global is working. Its just at what ratio to use it.
I don't have the answer to this yet. But to add. I now have the contours of the above doc.
I used find contours tutorial with some customization of the file loading. Note: removing words gives a thinner/cleaner outline.

Consider Otsu.
Its chief virtue is that it is adaptive to local
illumination within the image.
In your case, blank margins might be the saving grace.
Consider working on a series of 2x reduced resolution images,
where new pixel is min() (or even max()!) of original four pixels.
These reduced images might help you to focus on the features
that matter for your use case.
The usual way to deskew scanned text is to binarize and
then keep changing theta until "sum of pixels across raster"
is zero, or small. In particular, with few descenders
and decent inter-line spacing, we will see "lots" of pixels
on each line of text and "near zero" between text lines,
when theta matches the original printing orientation.
Which lets us recover (1.) pixels per line, and (2.) inter-line spacing, assuming we've found a near-optimal theta.
In your particular case, focusing on the ... leader dots
seems a promising approach to finding the globally optimal
deskew correction angle. Discarding large rectangles of
pixels in the left and right regions of the image could
actually reduce noise and enhance the accuracy of
such an approach.

OpenCV - How to remove convexity defects in a cam scanner?

I get in trouble by finding an algorithm to remove the convexity of my photos. As you can see the photos are captured from book pages, and I wanna remove the convexity. My question is similar to this but what I have is just page boundaries as input and neither I have grid nor am able to find by processing algorithms.
I wanna output as the right one in the below photo.
Obviously, the perspective transformation is the first thing comes in mind. However, as you can see the result is not promising:

Here's a possible pipeline to solve your problem. The main idea is to identify the text, create a super blob of it with some morphology, locate the 4 corners of this super blob and feed the points to a perspective "unwarper" (or rectifier, or whatever you wish to call that perspective correction method).
Start by converting your image to grayscale and apply adaptive thresholding to it. Try the Gaussian or Mean methods with parameters that better fit your tests. This is the result I obtain after fiddling with the values for a bit:
Now, the idea is to isolate just the text. The solution I applied is: obtain the biggest blobs and subtract them from the original image. You're going to need a method to calculate the area of each binary blob. Check this previous post for suggestions on how to implement one.
These are the biggest blobs from the image:
Subtract the largest blobs from the original image. This is the result:
As you can see, the text is almost isolated. Let me clean up the little bits of pixels by applying, again, an area filter. This time to eliminate the small blobs. This is the result:
Very good, some characters are lost during the operation, but that’s ok. We need a nice continuous block of text, because we are gonna dilate the hell of it. I tried applying a rectangular structuring element of size 5 and 5 Op iterations. Erode the output with 5 more iterations afterward, so you end up with this nice - isolated - super blob were the text used to be:
Check it out. The 3 markers you see are the centroids of the biggest blobs that I detected on the image. We need to find the 4 corners of the super blob. The biggest blob in the image is what we are after. I decided to re-use the area filter and look for the blob with the biggest area. This is the isolated super blob:
From here, the operations are pretty straightforward. Again, the goal is to get the four corners of this blob. You can fit a rectangle or apply an edge detector followed by Hough transform, to get the straight lines that follow the edges of the super blob.
I decided to apply a Canny Edge detector followed by Hough transform. Of course, I tuned the transform to filter only the possible lines I’m interested in – straight lines above a certain length. This is the result of the line detection:
There's some extra info plotted on the image. The markers you see (red and yellow) are the start/endpoints of the lines. My idea here was to find a bunch of these lines and compute the mean of these points. The idea is that we have a cluster of points that are separated in "quadrants". If we compute the mean of the start and endpoints of each line per quadrant, we will end up with 4 means – and these are the approximate values of the super blob’s corners!
I applied K-means to the start and endpoints of the lines, but you very well prefer other methods of processing. That's ok. My approximate corners are identified by the big red O markers in the above image.
As I suggested, try giving a fixed output position for these corners. I defined the red rectangle for the corners to be mapped on. For this test, I pretty much adjusted the rectangle manually. The perspective correction yields this result:
Some suggestions:
Depending on the resolution of the input image, you could downsize it
for a faster and better result, as your input seems big enough for
that.
Tune Hough Line Detection to yield larger lines. My current
configuration detects some smaller lines and that can hinder the
corner approximation.
I choose a somewhat robust method for calculating the 4 corners of
the super blob that I’ve personally used before (Edge detection +
Hough Line Transform + K-means) but whatever processing chain you
chose to obtain the data is entirely up to you!

OpenCV find subjective contours like the human eye does

When humans see markers suggesting the form of a shape, they immediately perceive the shape itself, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_contours. I'm trying to accomplish something similar in OpenCV in order to detect the shape of a hand in a depth image with very heavy noise. In this question, assume that skin color based detection is not working (actually it is the best I've achieved so far but it is not robust under changing light conditions, shadows or skin colors. Also various paper shapes (flat and colorful) are on the table, confusing color-based approaches. This is why I'm attempting to use the depth cam instead).
Here's a sample image of the live footage that is already pre-processed for better contrast and with background gradient removed:
I want to isolate the exact shape of the hand from the rest of the picture. For a human eye this is a trivial thing to do. So here are a few attempts I did:
Here's the result with canny edge detection applied. The problem here is that the black shape inside the hand is larger than the actual hand, causing the detected hand to overshoot in size. Also, the lines are not connected and I fail at detecting contours.
Update: Combining Canny and a morphological closing (4x4 px ellipse) makes contour detection possible with the following result. It is still waaay too noisy.
Update 2: The result can be slightly enhanced by drawing that contour to an empty mask, save that in a buffer and re-detect yet another contour on a merge of three buffered images. The line that combines the buffered images is is hand_img = np.array(np.minimum(255, np.multiply.reduce(self.buf)), np.uint8) which is then morphed once again (closing) and finally contour detected. The results are slightly less horrible than in the picture above but laggy instead.
Alternatively I tried to use an existing CNN (https://github.com/victordibia/handtracking) for detecting the approximate position of the hand's center (this step works) and then flood from there. In order to detect contours the result is put into an OTSU filter and then the largest contour is taken, resulting in the following picture (ignore black rectangles in the left). The problem is that some of the noise is flooded as well and the results are mediocre:
Finally, I tried background removers such as MOG2 or GMG. They are confused by the enormous amount of fast-moving noise. Also they cut off the fingertips (which are crucial for this project). Finally, they don't see enough details in the hand (8 bit plus further color reduction via equalizeHist yield a very poor grayscale resolution) to reliably detect small movements.
It's ridiculous how simple it is for a human to see the exact precise shape of the hand in the first picture and how incredibly hard it is for the computer to draw a shape.
What would be your recommended method to achieve an exact hand segmentation?

After two days of desperate testing, the solution was to VERY carefully apply thresholding to an well-preprocessed image.
Here are the steps:
Remove as much noise as you possibly can. In my case, denoising was done using Intel's pyrealsense2 (I'm using an Intel RealSense depth camera and the algorithms were written for that camera family, thus they work very well). I used rs.temporal_filter() and directly after rs.hole_filling_filter() on every frame.
Capture the very first frame. Besides capturing the exact distance to the table (for later thresholding), this step also saves a still picture that is blurred by a 100x100 px kernel. Since the camera is never mounted perfectly but slightly tilted, there's an ugly grayscale gradient going over the picture and making operations impossible. This still picture is then subtracted from every single later frame, eliminating the gradient. BTW: this gradient removal step is already incorporated in the screenshots shown in the question above
Now the picture is almost noise-free. Do not use equalizeHist. This does not simply increase the general contrast regularly but instead empathizes the remaining noise way too much. This was my main error I did in almost all experiments. Instead, apply a threshold (binary with fixed border) directly. The border is extremely thin, setting it at 104 instead of 205 makes a huge difference.
Invert colors (unless you have taken BINARY_INV in the previous step), apply contours, take the largest one and write it to a mask
Voilà!

Image Segmentation based on Pixel Density

I need some help developing some code that segments a binary image into components of a certain pixel density. I've been doing some research in OpenCV algorithms, but before developing my own algorithm to do this, I wanted to ask around to make sure it hasn't been made already.
For instance, in this picture, I have code that imports it as a binary image. However, is there a way to segment objects in the objects from the lines? I would need to segment nodes (corners) and objects (the circle in this case). However, the object does not necessarily have to be a shape.
The solution I thought was to use pixel density. Most of the picture will made up of lines, and the objects have a greater pixel density than that of the line. Is there a way to segment it out?
Below is a working example of the task.
Original Picture:
Resulting Images after Segmentation of Nodes (intersection of multiple lines) and Components (Electronic components like the Resistor or the Voltage Source in the picture)

You can use an integral image to quickly compute the density of black pixels in a rectangular region. Detection of regions with high density can then be performed with a moving window in varying scales. This would be very similar to how face detection works but using only one super-simple feature.
It might be beneficial to make all edges narrow with something like skeletonizing before computing the integral image to make the result insensitive to wide lines.

OpenCV has some functionality for finding contours that is able to put the contours in a hierarchy. It might be what you are looking for. If not, please add some more information about your expected output!

If I understand correctly, you want to detect the lines and the circle in your image, right?
If it is the case, have a look at the Hough line transform and Hough circle transform.

Robust Hand Detection via Computer Vision

I am currently working on a system for robust hand detection.
The first step is to take a photo of the hand (in HSV color space) with the hand placed in a small rectangle to determine the skin color. I then apply a thresholding filter to set all non-skin pixels to black and all skin pixels white.
So far it works quite well, but I wanted to ask if there is a better way to solve this? For example, I found a few papers mentioning concrete color spaces for caucasian people, but none with a comparison for asian/african/caucasian color-tones.
By the way, I'm working with OpenCV via Python bindings.

Have you taken a look at the camshift paper by Gary Bradski? You can download it from here
I used the the skin detection algorithm a year ago for detecting skin regions for hand tracking and it is robust. It depends on how you use it.
The first problem with using color for tracking is that it is not robust to lighting variations or like you mentioned, when people have different skin tones. However this can be solved easily as mentioned in the paper by:
Convert image to HSV color space.
Throw away the V channel and consider the H and S channel and hence
discount for lighting variations.
Threshold pixels with low saturation due to their instability.
Bin the selected skin region into a 2D histogram. (OpenCV"s calcHist
function) This histogram now acts as a model for skin.
Compute the "backprojection" (i.e. use the histogram to compute the "probability"
that each pixel in your image has the color of skin tone) using calcBackProject. Skin
regions will have high values.
You can then either use meanShift to look for the mode of the 2D
"probability" map generated by backproject or to detect blobs of
high "probability".
Throwing away the V channel in HSV and only considering H and S channels is really enough (surprisingly) to detect different skin tones and under different lighting variations. A plus side is that its computation is fast.
These steps and the corresponding code can be found in the original OpenCV book.
As a side note, I've also used Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) before. If you are only considering color then I would say using histograms or GMM makes not much difference. In fact the histogram would perform better (if your GMM is not constructed to account for lighting variations etc.). GMM is good if your sample vectors are more sophisticated (i.e. you consider other features) but speed-wise histogram is much faster because computing the probability map using histogram is essentially a table lookup whereas GMM requires performing a matrix computation (for vector with dimension > 1 in the formula for multi-dimension gaussian distribution) which can be time consuming for real time applications.
So in conclusion, if you are only trying to detect skin regions using color, then go with the histogram method. You can adapt it to consider local gradient as well (i.e. histogram of gradients but possibly not going to the full extent of Dalal and Trigg's human detection algo.) so that it can differentiate between skin and regions with similar color (e.g. cardboard or wooden furniture) using the local texture information. But that would require more effort.
For sample source code on how to use histogram for skin detection, you can take a look at OpenCV"s page here. But do note that it is mentioned on that webpage that they only use the hue channel and that using both hue and saturation would give better result.
For a more sophisticated approach, you can take a look at the work on "Detecting naked people" by Margaret Fleck and David Forsyth. This was one of the earlier work on detecting skin regions that considers both color and texture. The details can be found here.
A great resource for source code related to computer vision and image processing, which happens to include code for visual tracking can be found here. And not, its not OpenCV.
Hope this helps.

Here is a paper on adaptive gaussian mixture model skin detection that you might find interesting.
Also, I remember reading a paper (unfortunately I can't seem to track it down) that used a very clever technique, but it required that you have the face in the field of view. The basic idea was detect the person's face, and use the skin patch detected from the face to identify the skin color automatically. Then, use a gaussian mixture model to isolate the skin pixels robustly.
Finally, Google Scholar may be a big help in searching for state of the art in skin detection. It's heavily researched in adademia right now as well as used in industry (e.g., Google Images and Facebook upload picture policies).

I have worked on something similar 2 years ago. You can try with Particle Filter (Condensation), using skin color pixels as input for initialization. It is quite robust and fast.
The way I applied it for my project is at this link. You have both a presentation (slides) and the survey.
If you initialize the color of the hand with the real color extracted from the hand you are going to track you shouldn't have any problems with black people.
For particle filter I think you can find some code implementation samples. Good luck.

It will be hard for you to find skin tone based on color only.
First of all, it depends strongly on the automatic white balance algorithm.
For example, in this image, any person can see that the color is skin tone. But for the computer it will be blue.
Second, correct color calibration in digital cameras is a hard thing, and it will be rarely accurate enough for your purposes.
You can see www.DPReview.com, to understand what I mean.
In conclusion, I truly believe that the color by itself can be an input, but it is not enough.

Well my experience with the skin modeling are bad, because:
1) lightning can vary - skin segmentation is not robust
2) it will mark your face also (as other skin-like objects)
I would use machine learning techniques like Haar training, which, in my opinion, if far more better approach than modeling and fixing some constraints (like skin detection + thresholding...)

As more robust then pixel colour you can use hand geometry model. First project model for particular gesture and the cross-correlate it with source image. Here is demo of this tchnique.