Counting fishes on an image - python-3.x

I want to build a script that can count and box fishes in a given image with the assumption that the image will always contain fishes (any number) and no other animals.
My current approach is just to count the number of contours detected in an image. I use canny edge detection with dilation and erosion. I also discard contours that are too small, treating them as noise.
This approach seems to be working fine if the fishes are nicely separated. But once they are intersecting, or covering each other, things start to get messy.
Currently, I am just using images from google.
What other approach can I use for this problem? Still a newbie in image processing.
Thank you so much!

What other approach can I use for this problem?
You can try to detect just a particular feature of the fish, such as an eye, mouth, or fin. You can try to detect whole fish, and also count particular features as above; if the numbers don't match you can deduce that you've found some partial fish.

Related

Is it possible to cut parts out of a picture and analyze them separately with python?

I am doing some studies on eye vascularization - my project contains a machine which can detect the different blood vessels in the retinal membrane at the back of the eye. What I am looking for is a possibility to segment the picture and analyze each segmentation on it`s own. The Segmentation consist of six squares wich I want to analyze separately on the density of white pixels.
I would be very thankful for every kind of input, I am pretty new in the programming world an I actually just have a bare concept on how it should work.
Thanks and Cheerio
Sam
Concept DrawOCTA PICTURE
You could probably accomplish this by using numpy to load the image and split it into sections. You could then analyze the sections using scikit-image or opencv (though this could be difficult to get working. To view the image, you can either save it to a file using numpy, or use matplotlib to open it in a new window.
First of all, please note that in image processing "segmentation" describes the process of grouping neighbouring pixels by context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_segmentation
What you want to do can be done in various ways.
The most common way is by using ROIs or AOIs (region/area of interest). That's basically some geometric shape like a rectangle, circle, polygon or similar defined in image coordinates.
The image processing is then restricted to only process pixels within that region. So you don't slice your image into pieces but you restrict your evaluation to specific areas.
Another way, like you suggested is to cut the image into pieces and process them one by one. Those sub-images are usually created using ROIs.
A third option which is rather limited but sufficient for simple tasks like yours is accessing pixels directly using coordinate offsets and several nested loops.
Just google "python image processing" in combination with "library" "roi" "cropping" "sliding window" "subimage" "tiles" "slicing" and you'll get tons of information...

Turn an image into lines and circles

I need to be able to turn a black and white image into series of lines (start, end points) and circles (start point, radius). I have a "pen width" that's constant.
(I'm working with a screen that can only work with this kind of graphics).
Problem is, I don't want to over complicate things - I could represent any image with loads of small lines, but it would take a lot of time to draw, so I basically want to "approximate" the image using those lines and circles.
I've tried several approaches (guessing lines, working area by area, etc) but none had any reasonable results without using a lot of lines and circles.
Any idea on how to approach this problem?
Thanks in advance!
You don't specify what language you are working in here but I'd suggest OpenCV if possible. If not, then most decent CV libraries ought to support the features that I'm about to describe here.
You don't say if the input is already composed of simple shapes ( lines and polygons) or not. Assuming that it's not, i.e. it's a photo or frame from a video for example, you'll need to do some edge extraction to find the lines that you are going to model. Use a Canny or other edge detector to convert the image into a series of lines.
I suggest that you then extract Circles as they are the richest feature that you can model directly. You should consider using a Hough Circle transform to locate circles in your edge image. Once you've located them you need to remove them from the edge image (to avoid duplicating them in the line processing section below).
Now, for each pixel in the edge image that's 'on' you want to find the longest line segment that it's a part of. There are a number of algorithms for doing this, simplest would be Probabilistic Hough Transform (also available in openCV) to extract line segments which will give you control over the minimum length, allowed gaps etc. You may also want to examine alternatives like LSWMS which has OpenCV source code freely available.
Once you have extracted the lines and circles you can plot them into a new image or save the coordinates for your output device.

Getting screenshot and find location of multiple smaller images in it in linux

I want to get a screenshot of a x11 window and find the location of smaller images in it. I've had no experiences with working with images, I searched a lot, but I don't get much helpful results.
The image are from files and can be loaded with any format that is easier to use.
The getting screenshot is easy, using XGetImage. But then the question is that which format to use XYPixmap or ZPixmap? What's the difference? How each pixel is represented?
And then what about the images? Which file format is easier to use? And then how each pixel is represented in that format?
And which algorithm should I use to find the location of the images in the screenshot?
I'm really lost here. I need a push in the right direction and see some example code that can help me to understand what I'm dealing with. Couldn't find any similar work.
The language, frameworks or the tools doesn't really matter to me as long as I get it working on my ubuntu machine. I can work in either C, C++, haskell, python or javascript.
With XYPixmap, each image plane is a separate bitmap (one bit per pixel, with padding at the end each scanline). If you have 24-bit color, you get 24 separate bitmaps. To retrieve pixel value at some (x,y) coordinates, you need to fetch one bit from each of the bitmaps at these coordinates, and pack these bits into a pixel.
With ZPixmap, pixels are represented as sequences of bits, with padding at the end of each scanline. If you have 24-bit color, every 3 bytes is a pixel.
In both cases, there may bee padding in the end and sometimes in the beginning of each scanline. It is all described here.
I would not use either format directly. Convert your pixmap to a simple 1, 2, or 4 bytes-per-pixel 2D array, and do the same with the patterns you want to search. If you want to find exact matches, you can use a slightly modified string search algorithm like KMP. Fuzzy matches are tricky, I don't know of any methods that work well.

Counting foreground objects in a binary image

I have an image sequence (video). I would like to count the number of objects in the image sequence. But the main objective is to count them once, meaning not just in each and every frame, since an object may exist in for several frames. My idea is to count the objects as they exit the screen, because of less occlusions. I am thinking of doing this by scanning the bottom part of the image for non zero pixels.
I have a CV_FILLED binary image (from rectangle function) where I want to do the scanning, then create an instance on an object if abject is found. But this scanning will not be scanning each and every pixel along the horizontal line, just certain sections.
Like we could do it over ranges, say certain columns, then skip by a margin.
A sample binary image I have is attached . This is an image obtained from the feed. I do not want to count only the objects in this image, but also those that are still coming.
A full picture of detected objects is attached here.Your guidance or constructive criticism is welcome
* I do not want to use CVBlob
If you don't want to use cvBlobLib, you could use the contour detection that is part of OpenCV.
There is a tutorial on the website.
The doc for the method is here. Your image seem pretty simple, but if you get blobs with occlusions and so you want to look at the CV_RETR_EXTERNAL constant to get only the outer contours.
That is what I usualy use, even though it needs a bit more work to use the results of the method.
Hope this helps.
If the squares do not overlap at the bottom, I suggest the following:
scan the very bottom row of the image and identify those connected pixels which are white. Each white line will correspond to one square. Save the center of the white line segment and its length. In the next frame, do the same and associate the corresponding line segments to the previous (same length and center very close). When you cannot find a corresponding line segment anymore, the square has moved out of the image which means you can increase your squares counter by one. Note that line segments at the right and left ends of the line will have decreasing length with every frame.
Thx guys. I managed to solve this already. I used small ROIs along the paths of the squares, and found countNonZero() within the ROI.
I kept on checking with boolean variables to see if the ROI still had the white pixels. If not, incremented counter. Worked well, and I was able to count.
Thx for your input...

Imaging Question: How to determine image quality?

I'm looking for ways to determine the quality of a photography (jpg). The first thing that came into my mind was to compare the file-size to the amount of pixel stored within. Are there any other ways, for example to check the amount of noise in a jpg? Does anyone have a good reading link on this topic or any experience? By the way, the project I'm working on is written in C# (.net 3.5) and I use the Aurigma Graphics Mill for image processing.
Thanks in advance!
I'm not entirely clear what you mean by "quality", if you mean the quality setting in the JPG compression algorithm then you may be able to extract it from the EXIF tags of the image (relies on the capture device putting them in and no-one else overwriting them) for your library see here:
http://www.aurigma.com/Support/DocViewer/30/JPEGFileFormat.htm.aspx
If you mean any other sort of "quality" then you need to come up with a better definition of quality. For example, over-exposure may be a problem in which case hunting for saturated pixels would help determine that specific sort of quality. Or more generally you could look at statistics (mean, standard deviation) of the image histogram in the 3 colour channels. The image may be out of focus, in which case you could look for a cutoff in the spatial frequencies of the image Fourier transform. If you're worried about speckle noise then you could try applying a median filter to the image and comparing back to the original image (more speckle noise would give a larger change) - I'm guessing a bit here.
If by "quality" you mean aesthetic properties of composition etc then - good luck!
The 'quality' of an image is not measurable, because it doesn't correspond to any particular value.
If u take it as number of pixels in the image of specific size its not accurate. You might talk about a photograph taken in bad light conditions as being of 'bad quality', even though it has exactly the same number of pixels as another image taken in good light conditions. This term is often used to talk about the overall effect of an image, rather than its technical specifications.
I wanted to do something similar, but wanted the "Soylent Green" option and used people to rank images by performing comparisons. See the question responses here.
I think you're asking about how to determine the quality of the compression process itself. This can be done by converting the JPEG to a BMP and comparing that BMP to the original bitmap from with the JPEG was created. You can iterate through the bitmaps pixel-by-pixel and calculate a pixel-to-pixel "distance" by summing the differences between the R, G and B values of each pair of pixels (i.e. the pixel in the original and the pixel in the JPEG) and dividing by the total number of pixels. This will give you a measure of the average difference between the original and the JPEG.
Reading the number of pixels in the image can tell you the "megapixel" size(#pixels/1000000), which can be a crude form of programatic quality check, but that wont tell you if the photo is properly focused, assuming it is supposed to be focused (think fast-motion objects, like trains), nor weather or not there is something in the pic worth looking at, that will require a human, or pigeon if you prefer.

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