Suppose I have a QR code, how would I look for the timing information (and therefore determining the version and size of the code)?
When I detect a code, I look for the three dark squares, the alignment information. I can then morph the picture, so that the picture is upright, with all edges and modules the same size and in the correct orientation. The next step is to look for timing information, so I can start decoding the code. But how do I find it? I don't know how many modules there are in one line at that point, and therefore, I don't know the exact location. How would I detect the timing lines?
Please note, that I can't use a library to decode the picture information. The idea is to recognize the picture information.
There are many ways you could estimate the module size.
ZXing estimates it based on the 1-1-3-1-1 ring pattern of the finders.
There's actually a set timing pattern between the finders, if you know their positions fairly accurately. It's just a matter of walking the pixels and calculating the average length of the white and black regions.
The ZXing estimate is a bit cruder but works pretty well. There are cases where it produces an incorrect estimate that walking the timer pattern would probably eliminate. But the common use case for ZXing is a live stream of images and one incorrect estimate isn't a big deal.
Related
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.
Given an input of 2D points, I would like to segment them in lines. So if you draw a zig-zag style line, each of the segments should be recognized as a line. Usually, I would use OpenCV's
cvHoughLines or a similar approach (PCA with an outlier remover), but in this case the program is not allowed to make "false-positive" errors. If the user draws a line and it's not recognized - it's ok, but if the user draws a curcle and it comes out as a square - it's not ok. So I have an upper bound on the error - but if it's a long line and some of the points have a greater distance from the approximated line, it's ok again. Summed up:
-line detection
-no false positives
-bounded, dynamically adjusting error
Oh, and the points are drawn in sequence, just like hand drawing.
At least it does not have to be fast. It's for a sketching tool. Anyone has an idea?
This has the same difficulty as voice and gesture recognition. In other words, you can never be 100% sure that you've found all the corners/junctions, and among those you've found you can never be 100% sure they are correct. The reason you can't be absolutely sure is because of ambiguity. The user might have made a single stroke, intending to create two lines that meet at a right angle. But if they did it quickly, the 'corner' might have been quite round, so it wouldn't be detected.
So you will never be able to avoid false positives. The best you can do is mitigate them by exploring several possible segmentations, and using contextual information to decide which is the most likely.
There are lots of papers on sketch segmentation every year. This seems like a very basic thing to solve, but it is still an open topic. The one I use is out of Texas A&M, called MergeCF. It is nicely summarized in this paper: http://srlweb.cs.tamu.edu/srlng_media/content/objects/object-1246390659-1e1d2af6b25a2ba175670f9cb2e989fe/mergeCF-sbim09-fin.pdf.
Basically, you find the areas that have high curvature (higher than some fraction of the mean curvature) and slow speed (so you need timestamps). Combining curvature and speed improves the initial fit quite a lot. That will give you clusters of points, which you reduce to a single point in some way (e.g. the one closest to the middle of the cluster, or the one with the highest curvature, etc.). This is an 'over fit' of the stroke, however. The next stage of the algorithm is to iteratively pick the smallest segment, and see what would happen if it is merged with one of its neighboring segments. If merging doesn't increase the overall error too much, you remove the point separating the two segments. Rinse, repeat, until you're done.
It has been a while since I've looked at the new segmenters, but I don't think there have been any breakthroughs.
In my implementation I use curvature median rather than mean in my initial threshold, which seems to give me better results. My heavily modified implementation is here, which is definitely not a self-contained thing, but it might give you some insight. http://code.google.com/p/pen-ui/source/browse/trunk/thesis-code/src/org/six11/sf/CornerFinder.java
I will be start working on a robotics project which involves a mobile robot that has mounted 2 cameras (1.3 MP) fixed at a distance of 0.5m in between.I also have a few ultrasonic sensors, but they have only a 10 metter range and my enviroment is rather large (as an example, take a large warehouse with many pillars, boxes, walls .etc) .My main task is to identify obstacles and also find a roughly "best" route that the robot must take in order to navigate in a "rough" enviroment (the ground floor is not smooth at all). All the image processing is not made on the robot, but on a computer with NVIDIA GT425 2Gb Ram.
My questions are :
Should I mount the cameras on a rotative suport, so that they take pictures on a wider angle?
It is posible creating a reasonable 3D reconstruction based on only 2 views at such a small distance in between? If so, to what degree I can use this for obstacle avoidance and a best route construction?
If a roughly accurate 3D representation of the enviroment can be made, how can it be used as creating a map of the enviroment? (Consider the following example: the robot must sweep an fairly large area and it would be energy efficient if it would not go through the same place (or course) twice;however when a 3D reconstruction is made from one direction, how can it tell if it has already been there if it comes from the opposite direction )
I have found this response on a similar question , but I am still concerned with the accuracy of 3D reconstruction (for example a couple of boxes situated at 100m considering the small resolution and distance between the cameras).
I am just starting gathering information for this project, so if you haved worked on something similar please give me some guidelines (and some links:D) on how should I approach this specific task.
Thanks in advance,
Tamash
If you want to do obstacle avoidance, it is probably easiest to use the ultrasonic sensors. If the robot is moving at speeds suitable for a human environment then their range of 10m gives you ample time to stop the robot. Keep in mind that no system will guarantee that you don't accidentally hit something.
(2) It is posible creating a reasonable 3D reconstruction based on only 2 views at such a small distance in between? If so, to what degree I can use this for obstacle avoidance and a best route construction?
Yes, this is possible. Have a look at ROS and their vSLAM. http://www.ros.org/wiki/vslam and http://www.ros.org/wiki/slam_gmapping would be two of many possible resources.
however when a 3D reconstruction is made from one direction, how can it tell if it has already been there if it comes from the opposite direction
Well, you are trying to find your position given a measurement and a map. That should be possible, and it wouldn't matter from which direction the map was created. However, there is the loop closure problem. Because you are creating a 3D map at the same time as you are trying to find your way around, you don't know whether you are at a new place or at a place you have seen before.
CONCLUSION
This is a difficult task!
Actually, it's more than one. First you have simple obstacle avoidance (i.e. Don't drive into things.). Then you want to do simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM, read Wikipedia on that) and finally you want to do path planning (i.e. sweeping the floor without covering area twice).
I hope that helps?
I'd say no if you mean each eye rotating independently. You won't get the accuracy you need to do the stereo correspondence and make calibration a nightmare. But if you want the whole "head" of the robot to pivot, then that may be doable. But you should have some good encoders on the joints.
If you use ROS, there are some tools which help you turn the two stereo images into a 3d point cloud. http://www.ros.org/wiki/stereo_image_proc. There is a tradeoff between your baseline (the distance between the cameras) and your resolution at different ranges. large baseline = greater resolution at large distances, but it also has a large minimum distance. I don't think i would expect more than a few centimeters of accuracy from a static stereo rig. and this accuracy only gets worse when you compound there robot's location uncertainty.
2.5. for mapping and obstacle avoidance the first thing i would try to do is segment out the ground plane. the ground plane goes to mapping, and everything above is an obstacle. check out PCL for some point cloud operating functions: http://pointclouds.org/
if you can't simply put a planar laser on the robot like a SICK or Hokuyo, then i might try to convert the 3d point cloud into a pseudo-laser-scan then use some off the shelf SLAM instead of trying to do visual slam. i think you'll have better results.
Other thoughts:
now that the Microsoft Kinect has been released, it is usually easier (and cheaper) to simply use that to get a 3d point cloud instead of doing actual stereo.
This project sounds a lot like the DARPA LAGR program. (learning applied to ground robots). That program is over, but you may be able to track down papers published from it.
This is my "weekend" hobby problem.
I have some well-loved single-cycle waveforms from the ROMs of a classic synthesizer.
These are 8-bit samples (256 possible values).
Because they are only 8 bits, the noise floor is pretty high. This is due to quantization error. Quantization error is pretty weird. It messes up all frequencies a bit.
I'd like to take these cycles and make "clean" 16-bit versions of them. (Yes, I know people love the dirty versions, so I'll let the user interpolate between dirty and clean to whatever degree they like.)
It sounds impossible, right, because I've lost the low 8 bits forever, right? But this has been in the back of my head for a while, and I'm pretty sure I can do it.
Remember that these are single-cycle waveforms that just get repeated over and over for playback, so this is a special case. (Of course, the synth does all kinds of things to make the sound interesting, including envelopes, modulations, filters cross-fading, etc.)
For each individual byte sample, what I really know is that it's one of 256 values in the 16-bit version. (Imagine the reverse process, where the 16-bit value is truncated or rounded to 8 bits.)
My evaluation function is trying to get the minimum noise floor. I should be able to judge that with one or more FFTs.
Exhaustive testing would probably take forever, so I could take a lower-resolution first pass. Or do I just randomly push randomly chosen values around (within the known values that would keep the same 8-bit version) and do the evaluation and keep the cleaner version? Or is there something faster I can do? Am I in danger of falling into local minimums when there might be some better minimums elsewhere in the search space? I've had that happen in other similar situations.
Are there any initial guesses I can make, maybe by looking at neighboring values?
Edit: Several people have pointed out that the problem is easier if I remove the requirement that the new waveform would sample to the original. That's true. In fact, if I'm just looking for cleaner sounds, the solution is trivial.
You could put your existing 8-bit sample into the high-order byte of your new 16-bit sample, and then use the low order byte to linear interpolate some new 16 bit datapoints between each original 8-bit sample.
This would essentially connect a 16 bit straight line between each of your original 8-bit samples, using several new samples. It would sound much quieter than what you have now, which is a sudden, 8-bit jump between the two original samples.
You could also try apply some low-pass filtering.
Going with the approach in your question, I would suggest looking into hill-climbing algorithms and the like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing
has more information on it and the sidebox has links to other algorithms which may be more suitable.
AI is like alchemy - we never reached the final goal, but lots of good stuff came out along the way.
Well, I would expect some FIR filtering (IIR if you really need processing cycles, but FIR can give better results without instability) to clean up the noise. You would have to play with it to get the effect you want but the basic problem is smoothing out the sharp edges in the audio created by sampling it at 8 bit resolutions. I would give a wide birth to the center frequency of the audio and do a low pass filter, and then listen to make sure I didn't make it sound "flat" with the filter I picked.
It's tough though, there is only so much you can do, the lower 8 bits is lost, the best you can do is approximate it.
It's almost impossible to get rid of noise that looks like your signal. If you start tweeking stuff in your frequency band it will take out the signal of interest.
For upsampling, since you're already using an FFT, you can add zeros to the end of the frequency domain signal and do an inverse FFT. This completely preserves the frequecy and phase information of the original signal, although it spreads the same energy over more samples. If you shift it 8bits to be a 16bit samples first, this won't be a too much of a problem. But I usually kick it up by an integer gain factor before doing the transform.
Pete
Edit:
The comments are getting a little long so I'll move some to the answer.
The peaks in the FFT output are harmonic spikes caused by the quantitization. I tend to think of them differently than the noise floor. You can dither as someone mentioned and eliminate the amplitude of the harmonic spikes and flatten out the noise floor, but you loose over all signal to noise on the flat part of your noise floor. As far as the FFT is concerned. When you interpolate using that method, it retains the same energy and spreads over more samples, this reduces the amplitude. So before doing the inverse, give your signal more energy by multipling by a gain factor.
Are the signals simple/complex sinusoids, or do they have hard edges? i.e. Triangle, square waves, etc. I'm assuming they have continuity from cycle to cycle, is that valid? If so you can also increase your FFT resolution to more precisely pinpoint frequencies by increasing the number of waveform cycles fed to your FFT. If you can precisely identify the frequencies use, assuming they are somewhat discrete, you may be able to completely recreate the intended signal.
The 16-bit to 8-bit via truncation requirement will produce results that do not match the original source. (Thus making finding an optimal answer more difficult.) Typically you would produce a fixed point waveform by attempting to "get the closest match" that means rounding to the nearest number (trunking is a floor operation). That is most likely how they were originally generated. Adding 0.5 (in this case 0.5 is 128) and then trunking the output would allow you to generate more accurate results. If that's not a worry then ok, but it definitely will have a negative effect on accuracy.
UPDATED:
Why? Because the goal of sampling a signal is to be able to as close a possible reproduce the signal. If conversion threshold is set poorly on the sampling all you're error is to one side of signal and not well distributed and centered about zero. On such systems you typically try to maximize the use the availiable dynamic range, particularly if you have low resolution such as an 8-bit ADC.
Band limited versions? If they are filtered at different frequencies, I'd suspect it was to allow you to play the same sound with out distortions when you went too far out from the other variation. Kinda like mipmapping in graphics.
I suspect the two are the same signal with different aliasing filters applied, this may be useful in reproducing the original. They should be the same base signal with different convolutions applied.
There might be a simple approach taking advantange of the periodicity of the waveforms. How about if you:
Make a 16-bit waveform where the high bytes are the waveform and the low bytes are zero - call it x[n].
Calculate the discrete Fourier transform of x[n] = X[w].
Make a signal Y[w] = (dBMag(X[w]) > Threshold) ? X[w] : 0, where dBMag(k) = 10*log10(real(k)^2 + imag(k)^2), and Threshold is maybe 40 dB, based on 8 bits being roughly 48 dB dynamic range, and allowing ~1.5 bits of noise.
Inverse transform Y[w] to get y[n], your new 16 bit waveform.
If y[n] doesn't sound nice, dither it with some very low level noise.
Notes:
A. This technique only works in the original waveforms are exactly periodic!
B. Step 5 might be replaced with setting the "0" values to random noise in Y[w] in step 3, you'd have to experiment a bit to see what works better.
This seems easier (to me at least) than an optimization approach. But truncated y[n] will probably not be equal to your original waveforms. I'm not sure how important that constraint is. I feel like this approach will generate waveforms that sound good.
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.