Using seamlessClone in OpenCV python produces image with "ghost" objects - python

I am trying to paste an object with a completely tight known mask onto an image so it should be easy, but without some post treatments I get artefacts at the border. I want to use the blending technique Poisson Blending to reduce the artefacts. It is implemented in opencv seamlessClone.
import cv2
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
#user provided tight mask array tight_mask of dtype uint8 with only white pixel the ones on the object the others are black (50x50x3)
tight_mask
#object obj to paste a 50x50x3 uint8 in color
obj
#User provided image im which is large 512x512 of a mostly uniform background in colors
im
#two different modes of poisson blending, which give approximately the same result
normal_clone=cv2.seamlessClone(obj, im, mask, center, cv2.NORMAL_CLONE)
mixed_clone=cv2.seamlessClone(obj, im, mask, center, cv2.MIXED_CLONE)
plt.imshow(normal_clone,interpolation="none")
plt.imshow(mixed_clone, interpolation="none")
However, with the code above, I only get images where the pasted objects are very very very transparent. So they are obviously well blended but they are so blended that they fade away like ghosts of objects.
I was wondering if I was the only one to have such issues and if not what were the alternatives in term of poisson blending ?
Do I have to reimplement it from scratch to modify the blending factor (is that even possible ?), is there another way ? Do I have to use dilatation on the mask to lessen the blending ? Can I enhance the contrast somehow afterwards ?

In fact the poisson blending is using the gradient information in the image to paste to blend it into the target image.
It turns out that if the mask is completely tight the border gradient is then artificially interpreted as null.
That is why it ignores it completely and produces ghosts.
Using a larger mask by dilating the original mask using morphological operations and therefore including some background is thus the solution.
Care must be taken when choosing the color of the background included if the contrast is too big the gradient will be too strong and the image would not be well blended.
Using a color like gray is a good starting point.

Related

How to resize image without losing pixel qualityin python?

I have an 32x32 image. I resize it for 512x512 in python, quality and view of image is not same when I resize it in paint.
original image resized-with-paint resized-with-python
What is needed to add to have same result as Paint?
from PIL import Image
im=Image.open('1.png')
im=im.resize(512,512)
im.save('resized.png')
Use:
im = im.resize((521,512), resample=Image.NEAREST)
for that effect.
It is not really a "loss of quality" that you are seeing - it is actually a difference in the interpolation method. When upsizing an image, the algorithm effectively has to "invent" new pixels to fill the bitmap raster. Some algorithms interpolate between known surrounding values, other algorithms just take the closest value - also known as "Nearest Neighbour". There are both advantages and disadvantages - "Nearest Neighbour" will be faster and will not introduce new "in-between" colours into your resized image. On the downside, it will be slower, look more "blocky" and less smooth.
It requires some thought and experience to choose the appropriate method.

Irregular shape detection and measurement in python opencv

I'm attempting to do some image analysis using OpenCV in python, but I think the images themselves are going to be quite tricky, and I've never done anything like this before so I want to sound out my logic and maybe get some ideas/practical code to achieve what I want to do, before I invest a lot of time going down the wrong path.
This thread comes pretty close to what I want to achieve, and in my opinion, uses an image that should be even harder to analyse than mine. I'd be interested in the size of those coloured blobs though, rather than their distance from the top left. I've also been following this code, though I'm not especially interested in a reference object (the dimensions in pixels alone would be enough for now and can be converted afterwards).
Here's the input image:
What you're looking at are ice crystals, and I want to find the average size of each. The boundaries of each are reasonably well defined, so conceptually this is my approach, and would like to hear any suggestions or comments if this is the wrong way to go:
Image in RGB is imported and converted to 8bit gray (32 would be better based on my testing in ImageJ, but I haven't figured out how to do that in OpenCV yet).
The edges are optionally Gaussian blurred to remove noise
A Canny edge detector picks up the lines
Morphological transforms (erosion + dilation) are done to attempt to close the boundaries a bit further.
At this point it seems like I have a choice to make. I could either binarise the image, and measure blobs above a threshold (i.e. max value pixels if the blobs are white), or continue with the edge detection by closing and filling contours more fully. Contours seems complicated though looking at that tutorial, and though I can get the code to run on my images, it doesn't detect the crystals properly (unsurprisingly). I'm also not sure if I should morph transform before binarizing too?
Assuming I can get all that to work, I'm thinking a reasonable measure would be the longest axis of the minimum enclosing box or ellipse.
I haven't quite ironed out all the thresholds yet, and consequently some of the crystals are missed, but since they're being averaged, this isn't presenting a massive problem at the moment.
The script stores the processed images as it goes along, so I'd also like the final output image similar to the 'labelled blobs' image in the linked SO thread, but with each blob annotated with its dimensions maybe.
Here's what an (incomplete) idealised output would look like, each crystal is identified, annotated and measured (pretty sure I can tackle the measurement when I get that far).
Abridged the images and previous code attempts as they are making the thread overly long and are no longer that relevant.
Edit III:
As per the comments, the watershed algorithm looks to be very close to achieving what I'm after. The problem here though is that it's very difficult to assign the marker regions that the algorithm requires (http://docs.opencv.org/3.2.0/d3/db4/tutorial_py_watershed.html).
I don't think this is something that can be solved with thresholds through the binarization process, as the apparent colour of the grains varies by much more than the toy example in that thread.
Edit IV
Here are a couple of the other test images I've played with. It fares much better than I expected with the smaller crystals, and theres obviously a lot of finessing that could be done with the thresholds that I havent tried yet.
Here's 1, top left to bottom right correspond to the images output in Alex's steps below.
And here's a second one with bigger crystals.
You'll notice these tend to be more homogeneous in colour, but with harder to discern edges. Something I found a little suprising is that the edge floodfilling is a little overzealous with some of the images, I would have thought this would be particularly the case for the image with the very tiny crystals, but actually it appears to have more of an effect on the larger ones. There is probably a lot of room to improve the quality of the input images from our actual microscopy, but the more 'slack' the programming can take from the system, the easier our lives will be!
As I mentioned in the comments, watershed looks to be an ok approach for this problem. But as you replied, defining the foreground and the background for the markers is the hard part! My idea was to use the morphological gradient to get good edges along the ice crystals and work from there; the morphological gradient seems to work great.
import numpy as np
import cv2
img = cv2.imread('image.png')
blur = cv2.GaussianBlur(img, (7, 7), 2)
h, w = img.shape[:2]
# Morphological gradient
kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (7, 7))
gradient = cv2.morphologyEx(blur, cv2.MORPH_GRADIENT, kernel)
cv2.imshow('Morphological gradient', gradient)
cv2.waitKey()
From here, I binarized the gradient using some thresholding. There's probably a cleaner way to do this...but this happens to work better than the dozen other ideas I tried.
# Binarize gradient
lowerb = np.array([0, 0, 0])
upperb = np.array([15, 15, 15])
binary = cv2.inRange(gradient, lowerb, upperb)
cv2.imshow('Binarized gradient', binary)
cv2.waitKey()
Now we have a couple issues with this. It needs some cleaning up as it's messy, and further, the ice crystals that are on the edge of the image are showing up---but we don't know where those crystals actually end so we should actually ignore those. To remove those from the mask, I looped through the pixels on the edge and used floodFill() to remove them from the binary image. Don't get confused here on the orders of rows and columns; the if statements are specifying rows and columns of the image matrix, while the input to floodFill() expects points (i.e. x, y form, which is opposite from row, col).
# Flood fill from the edges to remove edge crystals
for row in range(h):
if binary[row, 0] == 255:
cv2.floodFill(binary, None, (0, row), 0)
if binary[row, w-1] == 255:
cv2.floodFill(binary, None, (w-1, row), 0)
for col in range(w):
if binary[0, col] == 255:
cv2.floodFill(binary, None, (col, 0), 0)
if binary[h-1, col] == 255:
cv2.floodFill(binary, None, (col, h-1), 0)
cv2.imshow('Filled binary gradient', binary)
cv2.waitKey()
Great! Now just to clean this up with some opening and closing...
# Cleaning up mask
foreground = cv2.morphologyEx(binary, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, kernel)
foreground = cv2.morphologyEx(foreground, cv2.MORPH_CLOSE, kernel)
cv2.imshow('Cleanup up crystal foreground mask', foreground)
cv2.waitKey()
So this image was labeled as "foreground" because it has the sure foreground of the objects we want to segment. Now we need to create a sure background of the objects. Now, I did this in the naïve way, which just is to grow your foreground a bunch, so that your objects are probably all defined within that foreground. However, you could probably use the original mask or even the gradient in a different way to get a better definition. Still, this works OK, but is not very robust.
# Creating background and unknown mask for labeling
kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (17, 17))
background = cv2.dilate(foreground, kernel, iterations=3)
unknown = cv2.subtract(background, foreground)
cv2.imshow('Background', background)
cv2.waitKey()
So all the black there is "sure background" for the watershed. Also I created the unknown matrix, which is the area between foreground and background, so that we can pre-label the markers that get passed to watershed as "hey, these pixels are definitely in the foreground, these others are definitely background, and I'm not sure about these ones between." Now all that's left to do is run the watershed! First, you label the foreground image with connected components, identify the unknown and background portions, and pass them in:
# Watershed
markers = cv2.connectedComponents(foreground)[1]
markers += 1 # Add one to all labels so that background is 1, not 0
markers[unknown==255] = 0 # mark the region of unknown with zero
markers = cv2.watershed(img, markers)
You'll notice that I ran watershed() on img. You might experiment running it on a blurred version of the image (maybe median blurring---I tried this and got a little smoother of boundaries for the crystals) or other preprocessed versions of the images which define better boundaries or something.
It takes a little work to visualize the markers as they're all small numbers in a uint8 image. So what I did was assign them some hue in 0 to 179 and set inside a HSV image, then convert to BGR to display the markers:
# Assign the markers a hue between 0 and 179
hue_markers = np.uint8(179*np.float32(markers)/np.max(markers))
blank_channel = 255*np.ones((h, w), dtype=np.uint8)
marker_img = cv2.merge([hue_markers, blank_channel, blank_channel])
marker_img = cv2.cvtColor(marker_img, cv2.COLOR_HSV2BGR)
cv2.imshow('Colored markers', marker_img)
cv2.waitKey()
And finally, overlay the markers onto the original image to check how they look.
# Label the original image with the watershed markers
labeled_img = img.copy()
labeled_img[markers>1] = marker_img[markers>1] # 1 is background color
labeled_img = cv2.addWeighted(img, 0.5, labeled_img, 0.5, 0)
cv2.imshow('watershed_result.png', labeled_img)
cv2.waitKey()
Well, that's the pipeline in it's entirety. You should be able to copy/paste each section in a row and you should be able to get the same results. The weakest parts of this pipeline is binarizing the gradient and defining the sure background for watershed. The distance transform might be useful in binarizing the gradient somehow, but I haven't gotten there yet. Either way...this was a cool problem, I would be interested to see any changes you make to this pipeline or how it fares on other ice-crystal images.

Rotate an image without black area

When we use some image processing library to rotate an image, the rotated image will always contains some black area. For example, I use the following python code to rotate an image:
from scipy import misc
img = misc.imread('test.jpg')
img = misc.imrotate(img,15)
misc.imsave('rotated.jpg')
The image is as follows:
My question is: how can I rotate an image without producing black area. I believe there exists some interpolation method to compensate for the missing area, which makes the image more natural.
It will be appreciated if anyone can provide a python code to achieve my task.
If you want to 'clone' or 'heal' the missing areas based on some part of the background, that's a complex problem, usually done with user intervention (in tools like Photoshop or GIMP).
Alternatives would be to fill the background with a calculated average colour - or just leave the original image. Neither will look 'natural' though.
The only approach that will work for all images will be to crop the rotated image to the largest rectangle within the rotated area. That will achieve your objective of having no black areas and looking natural, but at the cost of reducing the image size.
isnt there a simple paint fill function in your "some image library" ?, simple do that at all 4 corner pixels and then make it white or so.

Clipping image/remove background programmatically in Python

How to go from the image on the left to the image on the right programmatically using Python (and maybe some tools, like OpenCV)?
I made this one by hand using an online tool for clipping. I am completely noob in image processing (especially in practice). I was thinking to apply some edge or contour detection to create a mask, which I will apply later on the original image to paint everything else (except the region of interest) black. But I failed miserably.
The goal is to preprocess a dataset of very similar images, in order to train a CNN binary classifier. I tried to train it by just cropping the image close to the region of interest, but the noise is so high that the CNN learned absolutely nothing.
Can someone help me do this preprocessing?
I used OpenCV's implementation of watershed algorithm to solve your problem. You can find out how to use it if you read this great tutorial, so I will not explain this into a lot of detail.
I selected four points (markers). One is located on the region that you want to extract, one is outside and the other two are within lower/upper part of the interior that does not interest you. I then created an empty integer array (the so-called marker image) and filled it with zeros. Then I assigned unique values to pixels at marker positions.
The image below shows the marker positions and marker values, drawn on the original image:
I could also select more markers within the same area (for example several markers that belong to the area you want to extract) but in that case they should all have the same values (in this case 255).
Then I used watershed. The first input is the image that you provided and the second input is the marker image (zero everywhere except at marker positions). The algorithm stores the result in the marker image; the region that interests you is marked with the value of the region marker (in this case 255):
I set all pixels that did not have the 255 value to zero. I dilated the obtained image three times with 3x3 kernel. Then I used the dilated image as a mask for the original image (i set all pixels outside the mask to zero) and this is the result i got:
You will probably need some kind of method that will find markers automatically. The difficulty of this task depends heavily on the set of the input images. In some cases, the method can be really straightforward and simple (as in the tutorial linked above) but sometimes this can be a tough nut to crack. But I can't recommend anything because I don't know how your images look like in general (you only provided one). :)

Drawing boundry around heterogeneously textured tissue in microscopy study

I am in the process of putting together an OpenCV script to analyze immunohistochemically stained heart tissue. Our staining procedure renders cell types expressing certain proteins in their plasma membranes with pigments visible under a light microscope, which we use to photograph the images.
So far, I've succeded in segmenting the images to different layers based on color range using a modified version of the frequently cited color segmentation script available through the OpenCV community(http://opencv-python-tutroals.readthedocs.org/en/latest/py_tutorials/py_imgproc/py_colorspaces/py_colorspaces.html).
A screen shot of the original image:
B-Cell layer displayed:
At this point, I would like to calculate the ratio of area of B-Cells to unstained tissue. This operation prompted an extraction of the background cell layer as such based on color range:
Obviously, these results leave much to be desired.
Does anyone have ideas of how to approach this problem? Again, I would like to segment the background tissue (transparent) layer, which is unfortunately fairly sponge-like in texture. My goal is to create a mask representive of the area of unstained tissue. It seems a blur technique is necessary to fill the gaps in the tissue, but the loss in accuracy this approach entails is obvious.
In the sample image, the channels look highly correlated. If you apply decorrelation-stretching to the image you should be able to see more detail. Here in my blog post I've implemented decorrelation-stretching in C++ (unfortualtely not Python).
Using the sample code in the blog I did the following to segment the cell region:
dstretch the CIE Lab image with following targetMean and tergetSigma.
float mu[3] = {128.0f, 128.0f, 128.0f};
float sd[3] = {128.0f, 5.0f, 5.0f};
Mat mean = Mat(3, 1, CV_32F, mu);
Mat sigma = Mat(3, 1, CV_32F, sd);
Convert the dstretched CIE Lab image back to BGR.
Erode this BGR image with a 3x3 rectangular structuring element once.
Apply kmeans clustering to this eroded image with k = 2.
I don't know how good this segmentation is. I think it is possible to get a better segmentation by trying different values for the above parameters (mean, sigma, structuring element size and number of times the image is eroded).
(Following images are not to the original scale)
Original:
dstretched CIE Lab converted back to BGR:
Eroded:
kmeans with k = 2:

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