previous steps before to calculate disparity? Is rectification needed? - python-3.x

I want to do stereo vision and finally find the real distance to the objects from cameras. I have done image rectification.Now I want to calculate disparity. My question is, to do disparity, do I need to rectify images first? Thank you!

Yes, disparity needs rectified images. Since the stereo matching is done with epipolar lines, rectified images ensure that all the distortions are rectified and hence the algorithm can search blocks in a straight line. For a basic level you can try out StereoBM provided by openCV using the recitified stereo image pair.
Raw frames from camera -> Rectification -> Disparity map -> Depth perception.
This will be the pipeline for any passive stereo camera.

Related

Scaling an image according to audio (threshold, frequencies)

I am looking for scaling a PNG file according to an audio provided, a frequency range (20hz-1000hz for example) and a threshold, for a smooth effect.
For example, when there is a kick, scale go to 120% smoothly, I would like to make those audio visualizers such as dubstep, etc... where when kicks comes in, their image are "pumping".
First, is it doable with ffmpeg?
Where to start?
I found showcqt that takes frequencies in input etc., but its output is a video so I don't think I can use it in my case. Any help appreciated.
If you are able to read the PCM values as they are being output, then you might consider using a rolling RMS average in order to get a continuous stream of amplitudes. IDK the best length of the array. Perhaps it should correspond to the number of audio frames that would give you an update for each visual frame? The folks at the DSP site would have the best insights.
If you do a rolling average, computations are not terribly expensive. You'd do the square on the incoming and add that to a ring buffer (circular queue) and drop the outgoing. Only those data points need be added to the rolling average when computing the new rolling average, since the denominator is fixed and known. I found a video that describes the basic RMS math here using Matlab.
It might be necessary to add some smoothing to visualizer that is receiving the volume updates. Also, handing off data from the audio thread should likely employ some form of loose coupling. It would not be good if the thread that is processing the audio was also handling graphics.
I'm a little over my head, but I think this is what is generally done for visualizers.

I need to analyse many audio WAV files for characteristic noise, ideas?

I need to be able to analyze (search thru) hundreds of WAV files and detect but not remove static noise. As done currently now, I must listen to each conversation and find the characteristic noise/static manually, which takes too much time. Ideally, I would need a program that can read each new WAV file and be able to detect characteristic signatures of the static noise such as periods of bursts of white noise or full audio band, high amplitude noise (like AM radio noise over phone conversation such as a wall of white noise) or bursts of peek high frequency high amplitude (as in crackling on the phone line) in a background of normal voice. I do not need to remove the noise but simply detect it and flag the recording for further troubleshooting. Ideas?
I can listen to the recordings and find the static or crackling but this takes time. I need an automated or batch process that can run on its own and flag the troubled call recordings (WAV files for a phone PBX). These are SIP and analog conversations depending on the leg of the conversation so RTSP/SIP packet analysis might be an option, but the raw WAV file is the simplest. I can use Audacity, but this still requires opening each file and looking at the visual representation of the audio spectrometry and is only a little faster than listening to each call but still cumbersome.
I currently have no code or methods for this task. I simply listen to each call wav file to find the noise.
I need a batch Wav file search that can render wav file recordings that contain the characteristic noise or static or crackling over the recording phone conversation.
Unless you can tell the program how the noise looks like, it's going to be challenging to run any sort of batch processing. I was facing a similar challenge and that prompted me to develop (free and open source) software to help user in audio exploration, analysis and signal separation:
App: https://audioexplorer.online/
Docs: https://tracek.github.io/audio-explorer/
Source code: https://github.com/tracek/audio-explorer
Essentially, it visualises audio as a 2d scatter plot rather than only "linear", as in waveform or spectrogram. When you upload audio the following happens:
Onsets are detected (based on high-frequency content algorithm from aubio) according to the threshold you set. Set it to None if you want all.
Per each audio fragment, calculate audio features based on your selection. There's no universal best set of features, all depends on the application. You might try for starter with e.g. Pitch statistics. Consider setting proper values for bandpass filter and sample length (that's the length of audio fragment we're going to use). Sample length could be in future established dynamically. Check docs for more info.
The result is that for each fragment you have many features, e.g. 6 or 60. That means we have then k-dimensional (where k is number of features) structure, which we then project to 2d space with dimensionality reduction algorithm of your selection. Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection is a sound choice.
In theory, the resulting embedding should be such that similar sounds (according to features we have selected) are closely together, while different further apart. Your noise should be now separated from your "not noise" and form cluster.
When you hover over the graph, in right-upper corner a set of icons appears. One is lasso selection. Use it to mark points, inspect spectrogram and e.g. download table with features that describe that signal. At that moment you can also reduce the noise (extra button appears) in a similar way to Audacity - it analyses the spectrum and reduces these frequencies with some smoothing.
It does not completely solve your problem right now, but could severely cut the effort. Going through hundreds of wavs could take better part of the day, but you will be done. Want it automated? There's CLI (command-line interface) that I am developing at the same time. In not-too-distant future it should take what you have labelled as noise and signal and then use supervised machine learning to go through everything in batch mode.
Suggestions / feedback? Drop an issue on GitHub.

Do I need to rectify if camera planes are aligned?

If I am taking images from a pair of cameras whose principle axis(in both the cameras) is perpendicular to the baseline do I need to rectify the images?Typical example would be bumblebee stereo cameras.
If you can also guarantee that:
the camera axes are parallel (maybe so if bought as a single package like the bumblebee)
you have no lens distortion (probably not)
all the other internal camera parameters are identical
your measurement axis is parallel to your baseline
then you might be able to skip image rectification. Personally I wouldn't.
Just think about lens distortion. Even assuming everything else is equal and aligned, this might mess things up. Suppose a feature appears on the edge in one image and a the centre of the other. At the edge it might be distorted a few pixels away, while at the centre it appears where it should. Without rectification, your stereoscopic calculation (which assumes straight lines from object to sensor) is going to give you bad results.
Depends what you mean by "rectify". In stereo vision, it is common to ensure that the epipolar lines are aligned too. That means the i-th row in image 1 corresponds to the i-th row in image 2. An optional step is to reduce distortion caused by the rectification process.
If you are taking images from a pair of cameras whose principle axis is perpendicular to the baseline, then you have epipoles mapped on infinity (parallel epipolar lines in the same image). You need another transform to align the epipolar lines in both images. You will find this transform in Loop & Zhang's paper, also the transform to reduce distortion.
And be careful about lens distortion (see wxffles' answer).

Image Stabilization optical flow

I'm working on a image stabilization by using optical flow.
The algorithm that I've used is like this; first of all I have found good features to track in OpenCv "cvGoodFeaturesToTrack" and then I've estimated the optical flow by using this function for OpenCv as well "cvCalcOpticalFlowPyrLK".
Now I want to stabilize the video sequence, which I think I need to take the average of the optical flow vectors.
I'm working on a real time application so I can't use either SIFT or SURF.
The problem that I don't know how take the average.
Can anyone show me what to do?
Regards
You don't need to average anything. Optical flow will return the position of the "good features to track" in the second image. Transform the second image so that these features coincide with the features on the first image (use GetPerspectiveTransform).
I'll probably write an article on this soon on my website http://aishack.in/

Where can I learn how to work with audio data formats?

I'm working on an openGL project that involves a speaking cartoon face. My hope is to play the speech (encoded as mp3s) and animate its mouth using the audio data. I've never really worked with audio before so I'm not sure where to start, but some googling led me to believe my first step would be converting the mp3 to pcm.
I don't really anticipate the need for any Fourier transforms, though that could be nice. The mouth really just needs to move around when there's audio (I was thinking of basing it on volume).
Any tips on to implement something like this or pointers to resources would be much appreciated. Thanks!
-S
Whatever you do, you're going to need to decode the MP3s into PCM data first. There are a number of third-party libraries that can do this for you. Then, you'll need to analyze the PCM data and do some signal processing on it.
Automatically generating realistic lipsync data from audio is a very hard problem, and you're wise to not try to tackle it. I like your idea of simply basing it on the volume. One way you could compute the current volume is to use a rolling window of some size (e.g. 1/16 second), and compute the average power in the sound wave over that window. That is, at frame T, you compute the average power over frames [T-N, T], where N is the number of frames in your window.
Thanks to Parseval's theorem, we can easily compute the power in a wave without having to take the Fourier transform or anything complicated -- the average power is just the sum of the squares of the PCM values in the window, divided by the number of frames in the window. Then, you can convert the power into a decibel rating by dividing it by some base power (which can be 1 for simplicity), taking the logarithm, and multiplying by 10.

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