We Keep Coding

Determining Best Fit Center of Scattered 3D Points

I am attempting to find the center of several sets of 3D points on a sphere. Each set is comprised of three or more points that fall on the arc of a circle, but not perfectly as they have been supplied by an object detection algorithm, so there is some inherent error in these points. This is for me where the difficulty lies, I cannot simply solve the equations, I need to try and minimize variance in radius to this point across all three-point sets.
Currently, I am calculating a plane of best fit for each set of points. By calculating the radius (perpendicular distance) to this normal for each set and determining the variance I can figure out which plane (normal or center of rotation) fits all three sets the best. I am also doing this for an average of the three planes and for two planes after throwing out the plane that agrees least with the other two. So I am getting a pretty decent approximation currently.
My question is, does anyone know how to implement in Python some sort of function that can help me find a normal vector through these points that minimize the variance in radius for all sets. I suspect this won't be far off my current approximation, but am looking for the most accurate solution to this problem.
The picture below shows the results of what I am currently doing. The pink points represent the points I am using, labeled 0,1,2 for each set of points. The blue dots represent the normal vector projected to the surface of the sphere. The orange is the average of the three blue dots projected to the surface of the sphere. Ignore green they are not relevant to this. To minimize the variance my code is currently telling me that axis (blue dot) 0 results in the least variance in radius for the data set as a whole, but I highly doubt it is the best fitting point.

How to check if a 2D point is inside or outside a 2D Closed Bezier Curve using Python?

Hello,
in my 2d software i have two inputs available:
an array of XY points
[(x,y),(1,1),(2,2),(2,3),(-1,3),...]
and another matrix representing the closed 2D bezier curve handles
[((x,y),(x,y),(x,y)),
((-1,-1),(1,1),(1,2)),
((1,1),(2,2),(2,3)),
...]
How can i check if a point is inside or outside the given curve using python ? using preferably numpy maybe

I don't know how the theory of Bezier curves, so if your second list of points is a kind of compressed way to represent a Bezier curve, first try to sample some points of the curve with the precision you want.
So you have n points of your curve, and then you can apply a simple PIP algorithm : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon
I can explain in details later if you want to know how to do it programmatically.

I cant write code right here, because I need the entire program to understand properly, however I may provide two approaches how to do that.
The hardest way is to approximate each Bézier curve by a polyline. And then, according to the wiki you can use two techniques:
Ray casting algorithm: the shorthand of the algorithm: You put a ray, which starting from a point and goes through the entire polygon to an another point. Some lines lies inside a polygon, some outside. And then you check to which line belongs a specific point Looks like this:
Winding number algorithm: A little bit about winding numbers. So if a winding number is non-zero, the point lies inside the polygon
The huge drawback of this approach is that the accuracy depends on how close you approximated a curve to a polyline.
The second way is to use a bitmap. For example, you set your points to the white then render the area under the curve to the black and see if your points remain white. This method is more accurate and the fastest one, because you can use the GPU for the render.
And some links related to the first a approach:
https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/#intersections
http://web.mit.edu/hyperbook/Patrikalakis-Maekawa-Cho/node80.html

Curvature of a one-pixel wide curve

I have a numpy array depicting a one-pixel wide, discrete, connected curve. This curve is obtained by the Skeletonization operation of image processing. I am trying to find the curvature of the above curve at an arbitrary point, to detect bends/kinks (which will have high curvature value).
I tried to implement the above using the general formula for curvature. However, since this a pixelated, discrete curve, whose generating function is unknown, I tried to resort to using numpy gradient instead.
The problem I see with the above is that, since the curve is one-pixel wide, at any point the slope can be only one of 0, 1 or infinity. As a result, the curvature values that I get are mostly meaningless or useless.
I am looking for some suggestion on where to start in order to get a smooth curve out of the above, so that I can calculate curvature in a more meaningful way. Can somebody suggest any mathematical operation or convolution that I can apply to achieve the same? Below is a representative binary image that I have.
P.S. I am very, very new to image processing, so references to standard algorithms (in math books) or library implementations would be very helpful.

An established way to do this is to fit a low-order parametric curve to each of the skeletonized points using two or more neighbouring points. Then you compute curvature at the point using the fitted curve parameters with an analytic formula. Several curve models can be used. The two main models are:
A circle. The radius of curvature, R is the reciprocal of the curvature. For a curve, it equals the radius of the circular arc which best approximates the curve at that point. You can fit a circle to a set of 2D data points using various methods. A python library that has implemented several is here.
A quadratic. This can be fitted to the point and its neighbours, then curvature can be estimated through second-order differentiation of the curve here. You can use numpy.polyfit to fit this model. A simple strategy is to first estimate the tangent vector at the point, by fitting a local line (e.g. with polyfit using an order 1 curve). The you rotate the points to align the tangent vector with the x axis. Finally you fit a 1D quadratic f(x) to the rotated points using polyfit.
The tricky thing with making any curvature estimator is that curvature can be estimated at different scales. For example, do I want my estimator to be sensitive to high frequency detail or is this actually noise? This decision manifests in the choice of neighbourhood size. Too small, and errors from noise and discretization lead to unstable estimates. However too large, and there may be large modelling error (error by approximating the curve as a parametric function). Generally you have to select the best neighbourhood size yourself.
You're also going to have some poor curvature estimates at junction points, but that's largely unavoidable as curvature is not well defined there. A naïve fix could be to segment all paths at junction points, and then estimate curvature on each path individually.

Toby gave an excellent suggestion regarding junction points: detect the junction points and take each line in between those independently.
Detecting junction points (and end points). This is quite simple: all pixels that are set and have more than two neighbors are junction points. All pixels that are set and have exactly one neighbor are end points. Detect all those points and put their coordinates in a list.
Finding the lines in between pairs of points. Starting at each coordinate in your list, look for a line starting there. Note that for the junction points, you'll have at least three lines starting there. If you do this, you'll find each line two times. You can remove duplicates by reversing the lines that end to the left of where they start (and if the two end points are on the same image column, take the one on top as the start). Now they will be directly comparable, so you can delete the duplicates (or not store them in the first place). Note that just comparing start and end point is not sufficient as you can have different lines with the same start and end points.
Tracing each line. The step above requires that you trace each line. See if you can figure it out, it's fun! Here is a description of an algorithm that traces the outline of objects, you can use it as inspiration as this problem is very similar. Store a vector with x-coordinates and one with y-coordinates for each line.
Smoothing the lines. As you noticed, consecutive steps are in one of 8 directions, so angles are strongly discretized. You can prevent this by smoothing the coordinate vectors. This is a quick-and-dirty trick, but it works. Think of these vectors as 1D images, and apply a smoothing filter (I prefer the Gaussian filter for many reasons). Here you filter the vector with x-coordinates separately from the vector with y-coordinates.
Computing the curvature. Finally, you can compute the curvature of the curve, as the norm of the derivative of the unit normal to the curve. Don't forget to take the distance between points into account when computing derivatives!

Image registration using python and cross-correlation

I got two images showing exaktly the same content: 2D-gaussian-shaped spots. I call these two 16-bit png-files "left.png" and "right.png". But as they are obtained thru an slightly different optical setup, the corresponding spots (physically the same) appear at slightly different positions. Meaning the right is slightly stretched, distorted, or so, in a non-linear way. Therefore I would like to get the transformation from left to right.
So for every pixel on the left side with its x- and y-coordinate I want a function giving me the components of the displacement-vector that points to the corresponding pixel on the right side.
In a former approach I tried to get the positions of the corresponding spots to obtain the relative distances deltaX and deltaY. These distances then I fitted to the taylor-expansion up to second order of T(x,y) giving me the x- and y-component of the displacement vector for every pixel (x,y) on the left, pointing to corresponding pixel (x',y') on the right.
To get a more general result I would like to use normalized cross-correlation. For this I multiply every pixelvalue from left with a corresponding pixelvalue from right and sum over these products. The transformation I am looking for should connect the pixels that will maximize the sum. So when the sum is maximzied, I know that I multiplied the corresponding pixels.
I really tried a lot with this, but didn't manage. My question is if somebody of you has an idea or has ever done something similar.
import numpy as np
import Image
left = np.array(Image.open('left.png'))
right = np.array(Image.open('right.png'))
# for normalization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-correlation#Normalized_cross-correlation)
left = (left - left.mean()) / left.std()
right = (right - right.mean()) / right.std()
Please let me know if I can make this question more clear. I still have to check out how to post questions using latex.
Thank you very much for input.
[left.png] http://i.stack.imgur.com/oSTER.png
[right.png] http://i.stack.imgur.com/Njahj.png
I'm afraid, in most cases 16-bit images appear just black (at least on systems I use) :( but of course there is data in there.
UPDATE 1
I try to clearify my question. I am looking for a vector-field with displacement-vectors that point from every pixel in left.png to the corresponding pixel in right.png. My problem is, that I am not sure about the constraints I have.
where vector r (components x and y) points to a pixel in left.png and vector r-prime (components x-prime and y-prime) points to the corresponding pixel in right.png. for every r there is a displacement-vector.
What I did earlier was, that I found manually components of vector-field d and fitted them to a polynom second degree:
So I fitted:
and
Does this make sense to you? Is it possible to get all the delta-x(x,y) and delta-y(x,y) with cross-correlation? The cross-correlation should be maximized if the corresponding pixels are linked together thru the displacement-vectors, right?
UPDATE 2
So the algorithm I was thinking of is as follows:
Deform right.png
Get the value of cross-correlation
Deform right.png further
Get the value of cross-correlation and compare to value before
If it's greater, good deformation, if not, redo deformation and do something else
After maximzied the cross-correlation value, know what deformation there is :)
About deformation: could one do first a shift along x- and y-direction to maximize cross-correlation, then in a second step stretch or compress x- and y-dependant and in a third step deform quadratic x- and y-dependent and repeat this procedure iterativ?? I really have a problem to do this with integer-coordinates. Do you think I would have to interpolate the picture to obtain a continuous distribution?? I have to think about this again :( Thanks to everybody for taking part :)

OpenCV (and with it the python Opencv binding) has a StarDetector class which implements this algorithm.
As an alternative you might have a look at the OpenCV SIFT class, which stands for Scale Invariant Feature Transform.
Update
Regarding your comment, I understand that the "right" transformation will maximize the cross-correlation between the images, but I don't understand how you choose the set of transformations over which to maximize. Maybe if you know the coordinates of three matching points (either by some heuristics or by choosing them by hand), and if you expect affinity, you could use something like cv2.getAffineTransform to have a good initial transformation for your maximization process. From there you could use small additional transformations to have a set over which to maximize. But this approach seems to me like re-inventing something which SIFT could take care of.
To actually transform your test image you can use cv2.warpAffine, which also can take care of border values (e.g. pad with 0). To calculate the cross-correlation you could use scipy.signal.correlate2d.
Update
Your latest update did indeed clarify some points for me. But I think that a vector field of displacements is not the most natural thing to look for, and this is also where the misunderstanding came from. I was thinking more along the lines of a global transformation T, which applied to any point (x,y) of the left image gives (x',y')=T(x,y) on the right side, but T has the same analytical form for every pixel. For example, this could be a combination of a displacement, rotation, scaling, maybe some perspective transformation. I cannot say whether it is realistic or not to hope to find such a transformation, this depends on your setup, but if the scene is physically the same on both sides I would say it is reasonable to expect some affine transformation. This is why I suggested cv2.getAffineTransform. It is of course trivial to calculate your displacement Vector field from such a T, as this is just T(x,y)-(x,y).
The big advantage would be that you have only very few degrees of freedom for your transformation, instead of, I would argue, 2N degrees of freedom in the displacement vector field, where N is the number of bright spots.
If it is indeed an affine transformation, I would suggest some algorithm like this:
identify three bright and well isolated spots on the left
for each of these three spots, define a bounding box so that you can hope to identify the corresponding spot within it in the right image
find the coordinates of the corresponding spots, e.g. with some correlation method as implemented in cv2.matchTemplate or by also just finding the brightest spot within the bounding box.
once you have three matching pairs of coordinates, calculate the affine transformation which transforms one set into the other with cv2.getAffineTransform.
apply this affine transformation to the left image, as a check if you found the right one you could calculate if the overall normalized cross-correlation is above some threshold or drops significantly if you displace one image with respect to the other.
if you wish and still need it, calculate the displacement vector field trivially from your transformation T.
Update
It seems cv2.getAffineTransform expects an awkward input data type 'float32'. Let's assume the source coordinates are (sxi,syi) and destination (dxi,dyi) with i=0,1,2, then what you need is
src = np.array( ((sx0,sy0),(sx1,sy1),(sx2,sy2)), dtype='float32' )
dst = np.array( ((dx0,dy0),(dx1,dy1),(dx2,dy2)), dtype='float32' )
result = cv2.getAffineTransform(src,dst)

I don't think a cross correlation is going to help here, as it only gives you a single best shift for the whole image. There are three alternatives I would consider:
Do a cross correlation on sub-clusters of dots. Take, for example, the three dots in the top right and find the optimal x-y shift through cross-correlation. This gives you the rough transform for the top left. Repeat for as many clusters as you can to obtain a reasonable map of your transformations. Fit this with your Taylor expansion and you might get reasonably close. However, to have your cross-correlation work in any way, the difference in displacement between spots must be less than the extend of the spot, else you can never get all spots in a cluster to overlap simultaneously with a single displacement. Under these conditions, option 2 might be more suitable.
If the displacements are relatively small (which I think is a condition for option 1), then we might assume that for a given spot in the left image, the closest spot in the right image is the corresponding spot. Thus, for every spot in the left image, we find the nearest spot in the right image and use that as the displacement in that location. From the 40-something well distributed displacement vectors we can obtain a reasonable approximation of the actual displacement by fitting your Taylor expansion.
This is probably the slowest method, but might be the most robust if you have large displacements (and option 2 thus doesn't work): use something like an evolutionary algorithm to find the displacement. Apply a random transformation, compute the remaining error (you might need to define this as sum of the smallest distance between spots in your original and transformed image), and improve your transformation with those results. If your displacements are rather large you might need a very broad search as you'll probably get lots of local minima in your landscape.
I would try option 2 as it seems your displacements might be small enough to easily associate a spot in the left image with a spot in the right image.
Update
I assume your optics induce non linear distortions and having two separate beampaths (different filters in each?) will make the relationship between the two images even more non-linear. The affine transformation PiQuer suggests might give a reasonable approach but can probably never completely cover the actual distortions.
I think your approach of fitting to a low order Taylor polynomial is fine. This works for all my applications with similar conditions. Highest orders probably should be something like xy^2 and x^2y; anything higher than that you won't notice.
Alternatively, you might be able to calibrate the distortions for each image first, and then do your experiments. This way you are not dependent on the distribution of you dots, but can use a high resolution reference image to get the best description of your transformation.
Option 2 above still stands as my suggestion for getting the two images to overlap. This can be fully automated and I'm not sure what you mean when you want a more general result.
Update 2
You comment that you have trouble matching dots in the two images. If this is the case, I think your iterative cross-correlation approach may not be very robust either. You have very small dots, so overlap between them will only occur if the difference between the two images is small.
In principle there is nothing wrong with your proposed solution, but whether it works or not strongly depends on the size of your deformations and the robustness of your optimization algorithm. If you start off with very little overlap, then it may be hard to find a good starting point for your optimization. Yet if you have sufficient overlap to begin with, then you should have been able to find the deformation per dot first, but in a comment you indicate that this doesn't work.
Perhaps you can go for a mixed solution: find the cross correlation of clusters of dots to get a starting point for your optimization, and then tweak the deformation using something like the procedure you describe in your update. Thus:
For a NxN pixel segment find the shift between the left and right images
Repeat for, say, 16 of those segments
Compute an approximation of the deformation using those 16 points
Use this as the starting point of your optimization approach

You might want to have a look at bunwarpj which already does what you're trying to do. It's not python but I use it in exactly this context. You can export a plain text spline transformation and use it if you wish to do so.

How do you calculate the area of a series of random points?

So I'm working on a piece of code to take positional data for a RC Plane Crop Duster and compute the total surface area transversed (without double counting any area). I cannot figure out how to calculate the area for a given period of operation.
Given the following Table Calculate the area the points cover.
x,y
1,2
1,5
4,3
6,6
3,4
3,1
Any Ideas? I've browsed Greens Theorem and I'm left without a practical concept in which to code.
Thanks for any advise

Build the convex hull from the given points
Algorithms are described here
See a very nice python demo + src
Calculate its area
Python code is here

Someone mathier than me may have to verify the information here. But it looks legit: http://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-the-Area-of-a-Polygon and fairly easy to apply in code.

I'm not entirely sure that you're looking for "Surface area" as much as you're looking for Distance. It seems like you want to calculate the distance between one point and the next for that list. If that's the case, simply use the Distance Formula.
If the plane drops a constant width of dust while flying between those points, then the area is simply the distance between those points times the width of the spray.

If your points are guaranteed to be on an integer grid - as they are in your example - (and you really are looking for enclosed area) would Pick's Theorem help?

You will have to divide the complex polygon approximately into standard polygons (triangles, rectangles etc) and then find area of all of them. This is just like regular integration (only difference is that you are yet to find a formula to approximate your data).
The above points are when you assume that you are forming a closed polygon with your data.

Use to QHull to triangulate the region, then sum the areas of the resulting triangles.

Python now conveniently has a library that implements the method Lior provided. https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.spatial.ConvexHull.html will calculate the convex hull for any N dimensional space and calculate the area/volume for you as well. See the example and return value attributes towards the bottom of the page for details.