Detect "merged" objects on image - java

I have some lists of images. They always only contain growing objects. For example:
image01:
image 01+n:
image 01+n+n:
image 01+n+n+n:
What do i like to get? (This is the third picture, but modified)
If two (or more) objects merge i like to get the center point of the merge (red point) and also two lines from this point to the background.
I already tried today to solve this problem. I thought it is not so hard, but unfortunately it does not seem to be that easy.
I tried this:
1) For every picture make all objects black
2) Get all objects on every picture. Get the center for each object.
3) Check on every image if on one object is more than one center of a polygon of the previous image. If this is the case two objects merged.
4) If a merge was detected take the centers of the two merged object of the previous frame. Connect them with the A* algorithm on the current frame. Search now the pixel which was white on the previous frame. This is the "merge point".
5) Try now to get the two nearest white points and use them to draw the "break lines" (blue lines on the last image).
Unfortunately this seems not to be that easy and programming this is also hard. Probably an already implemented algorithm (java) exists which could do this job much easier? I implemented everything which I described (quick and dirty), but it is slow and buggy. Something doesn't work and it is hard to debug it. But I think there should be an easier solution.

So your problem is software development and algorithm development.
Because you say buggy and slow: for slow I dont care for now, it has to work; but the buggy is an issue (software development).
Part 3 is essentially correct: you take an object in the current frame and if it contains two objects in the previous frame its a merge.
Your connecting line of centers idea is not correct because the centers can be anywhere and the line will not pass through the connecting region.
Check the change that has happened in the current frame from the previous frame: that will be a hallo around both previous objects. Check the growth (part of this hallo) that is closest to both previous objects. That is take the growth of one object and check which part of the growth is close to the second object; do vice versa. This will give you the merging area.
It's a full project.

Related

How can I fill specific cells in a 2d array using tetris like shapes?

Concider I have an incomplete 2d array, with some of it's cells blocked, like this:
I want to fill that array with given tetris like shapes (perfect solution not guaranteed), those are the rules:
Path always connected, no "holes"
Pieces are pre-known and are enough to cover exactly 100% of path (if fitting)
Pieces can be rotated and flipped, makes it 8 different ways to place each piece
My question is, how can I brute-force it and ensure I actually checked all the variations?
My plan was to start from left top corner and seek for the next empty cell in a loop.
But then I don't know what to do when i get stuck. Maybe store placed pieces in a stack and try different ways but the fact I can both rotate pieces and change their places was too much for me. Working with java in case that's matter. thanks!

Auto transforming BufferedImage from side view/not perpendicular to perpendicular based on 4 points printed on list in Java

I see a lot of people just reading it... Maybe you need some extra info? Comment below and I'll give it!
As my previous questions were saying, I'm building a car that will orientate in the room based on an image that you would have taken with your phone. For that i would need an image that would represent the room. Since you cant take picture directly from the top of the room (unless you are a bird), I would need to transform it to a "perpendicular" image. It would be weird if you would have to do it manually so I decided to do it automatically. Now that is something harder :) Well I asked for transforming image in this thread and got that marked comment that solved part of my program. I'm still looking for a way to automate that. Since i need the image to be the same size as it would be in real life (we can take 1 pixel as 1 cm), we will probably need some kind of "points of reference" printed on an A4 paper sheet. Also, there will probably be needed some OpenCV since we will need to know the distance between two points in image. Besides that, how would you define the "correction" that has to be done based on four points?
I've done some pics for visual reference:
Id like to transform image like this:
To image like this (or even better):
EDIT: I'd like to do this in latest (3.1) version of which i have no idea about how to use it :)
EDIT #2: I've done some work on it, solving part of it in this post: Image perspective correction

How to identify an specif 'thing' in an image (Image Processing)

I'll start saying what I'm doing:
I'll take a photo with a webcam, in this photo there will be an object, always the same object, in a square format with letters inside it. I need to identify those letters. The step of identifying those letters is already done, the problem is the quality of the image coming from the webcam: it won't be the best nor in the best positioning, and the api I'm using to identify those letters requires positioning and quality.
The reason why I have a square is to help to identify where those letters are, so I can 'look for an square' in the image an then do what I've already done to identify the letters. My question is: is there more things I have to do in order to achieve this? Os is it only 're positioning the image, look for the square and then it's done'. If I need to study image processing there is no problem, I'm here because I don't even know what I have to look for.
I'm developing in Java because 'school things', so if there's already and api (I've heard and tried OpenCV, but I don't know what to do with it) it would really help me.
Thanks in advance.
Edit 1: As asked by Springfield762, I took some photos and I'll explain them below.
First let me explain what are the photos: the 'square thing' that will contain the letters isn't done yet, another department is taking care of it, so I had to improvise something here with pens and batteries. The letters will all be made of wood in a nice shape, I had to replace them with some Magicka cards as I don't have them yet, but the cards fits well to explain the example. I also made an example of the the square (that actually ended as an rectangle) in paint, so it has absolutely nothing of beautiful.
I took 3 photos, one using the light coming from the window, the second using the light of my room and the third using the flash of the webcam. (Sorry about links, I can't post images nor links, although I'm always here, this is the first time I post a question...)
Window light:
Room light:
Flash:
Square (rectangle) example:
The 'project' of the square you guys can ignore, I did it so that you can understand the images. And the reason I took 3 different photos was just to show all different possibilities that the webcam might be in. Also, the quality of the Magicka cards isn't a problem, since each card represents one letter, so it'll be easy to 'see' them.
Well, I found most answers to this question, I'll explain them below.
First it's not a square, but a rectangle, and it is still to be made. So I started testing the software using anything that was a rectangle, first I had to 'locate' the rectangle in the frame captured by the camera, then show it in the original image seen by the user, I accomplished that by:
Capturing the actual frame
Converting that frame to HSV;
Applying some kind of threshold (using the Core.inRange function, so that I could find a specific color in the range specified in the function);
Applying the Imgproc.findContours to find the contours of the rectangle;
Finally drawing a rectangle using the points found by the findContours;
How it ended: i.imgur.com/wmNVai0.jpg
After that I knew that I could place the rectangle in a way that all the letters inside it would be in a straight line, so I didn't need to care about the positioning of the letters. Now I had to fight with the OCR.
I chose Tesseract as it is OpenSource and seems to be a strong tool (supported by Google, that's for sure something), then I started to test some images.
In the beginning it was tough and I thought I'd have to train OCR even more, but the thing is that it has some kind of dictionary that tries to find words which are listed in this dictionary, and I didn't need that as I was looking for characters that could be in a total random way. I had to turn off that dictionary by adding the following line to a conf file:
load_system_dawg F
load_freq_dawg F
After that I had to change somethings in the image as well:
Transform into Grayscale;
Resize it by ~80%;
Original images (I can't post links...):
i.imgur.com/DFqNSYB.jpg
i.imgur.com/2Ntfqy3.jpg
Grayscale:
imgur.com/XUZ9b1Z.jpg
i.imgur.com/yjXMH5Q.jpg
Resized:
i.imgur.com/zgX9bKF.jpg
i.imgur.com/CWPRU3I.jpg
(Sometimes I had problems with resized images and on other moments I didn't, that's something I have to test even more.)
Then I could get some good results, though I'm still afraid as the light of the environment makes a whole difference, I still have to test it and mainly I still need the god da** base, I'll post it as an edit later.
If I did anything wrong or if anyone wants to correct me, please feel free to say it!

algorithm for drawing dendrogram stepwise from clustered objects in a tree

I want to draw a dendrogram from objects which I have already clustered and saved in a (leave)tree. My Cluster object in Java can be represented by these pictures. Each leaves contains an object and each node contains the distance between its children.
Now, I want to draw a dendrogram stepwise, so first object 1 and 2 should be drawn, then object 3 should be added to those. Then 5 and 6 together etc.. to the end where everything is connected. I already have all the tools to draw this easily, but I cannot find an efficient way in walking through the tree correctly.
This should be the result so far in the example (EDIT: There's a mistake, the distance from 5 to 6 now looks smaller than the distance from 3 to 1&2, but that isn't the case in my example!):
Does anyone have some tips for this recursive algorithm?
you're rendering depth first - you may find you need to keep track of depth to get the layout to work right - also note you have to draw non-terminal notes as well ("*" gets drawn before 3)
basically
draw(node)
{
if(hasleft) draw(left)
if(hasright) draw(right)
drawme()
}
this does assume a binary tree, but that is what you've drawn - and this is going to get a lot more complicated because of layout issues - you really want to consider drawing breadth first from the top down, it makes layout a lot less painful

designing picture puzzle

I am planning to develop a jigsaw puzzle game.
Now I already have images and image pieces, so we don't need algorithm to cut the image in pieces.
On the UI side there would be two sections
First section contains the broken images in random order.
Second section contains the outline of the full image. User need to drag and drop the the cut images onto the outline image.
I am not sure how can the pieces be matched on the the outline image?
Any idea about the algorithm or the starting pointers?
Allow the user to drag each piece into the outline area. Allow the piece to be rotated in 90 degree increments.
Option 1:
If a piece is in the correct location in the overall puzzle, and at the correct angle, AND connected to another piece, then snap it into place with some user feedback. The outside edge of the puzzle can count for a connection to edge pieces.
Option 2:
A neighbor is an adjacent puzzle piece when the puzzle is assembled. When the puzzle pieces are mixed up, they still have the same neighbors. Each puzzle piece (except the edge pieces) has four neighbors.
If a piece is near one of its neighbors at the correct angle relative to that neighbor, then snap it to the other piece. Then allow the two (or more) pieces to be dragged around as a unit, as is done with a single piece. This would allow the user to assemble subsections of the puzzle in any area, much like is done with a physical jigsaw puzzle, and connect the subsections with one another.
You can check the piece being moved to its four neighbors to see if they are close enough to snap together. If a piece has its proper edge close enough to the proper edge of its neighbor, at the same angle, then they match.
There are several ways to check relative locations. One way would be to temporarily rotate the coordinates of the piece you are testing so it is upright, then rotate the coordinates of all its desired neighbors, also temporarily, to the same angle. (Use the same center of rotation for all the rotations.) Then you can easily test to see if they are close enough to match. If the user is dragging a subassembly, then you will need to check each unmatched edge in the subassembly.
Option 2 is more complex and more realistic. Option 1 can be further simplified by omitting the rotation of pieces and making every piece the proper angle initally.
For a regular shapes you can go with a matrix. I recommend this as the first approach. Dividing the puzzle is as simple as defining X,Y dimensions of the matrix. For each piece you have a series of four values then, one for each side, saying whether it is flat, pointing out, or pointing in. This will give you a very classic jigsaw puzzle setup.
How the pieces actually look becomes a strict GUI thing. Now, for the first draft I recommend getting it working with perfectly square pieces. Taking rectangular bits of an image should be easy to do in any GUI framework.
To go to shaped pieces you'll need a series of templates. These will become masks that you apply to the image. Each mask clips out a tiny portion of the image to produce your piece. You'll probably need to dynamically create the masks in order to fit them to the puzzle. At first start with simply triangular connections. Once you have that working you can do the math to get nice bulbous connector shapes. Look up "clip" and "mask" in your GUI framework.
If you wish to do irregular polygon shapes that don't follow a general matrix layout, then you need to do a lot more work. This is why I recommend getting the square first working as a good example. Now you'll need to delve into graph theory and partitioning. Pick up some books on 3D programming -- focusing on algorithms, as they do partitioning all the time. Though I wouldn't doubt if there is a book with this exact topic in it.
Have fun.
the data structure is simple I guess- each peace will point to it's neighbors and will hold the actual shape to display.
on the MMI (UI) of the app - what is your developing environment ?
If it's windows - I would go with c# and winforms or even better wpf.
if it's unix, you'll have to get someone else's advise, as I'm not an expert there.
1) How to break image into random polygons
It seems that you have figured out this part. (from : "Now I already have images and image pieces, so we don't need algorithm to cut the image in pieces.")
2) what kind of data structure can solve the problem
You can create a Class Piece like Scribble class in this example and your pieces would be array of objects of Piece class.
So, you will have two arrays,
(i) actual image pieces array
(ii) image piece outline array
So, whenever you drag and drop one piece on to the full outline of image, it will check whether the image piece object is intersecting more than 80% and ID (member variable of Piece object) of actual image piece and image piece outline matches, then you got the right piece at right place...
3) UI implementation
Check this out.
You could make an array of objects of the class "PuzzleTile"
Every such tile has an image and an integer
After every move, check if the integers are sorted correctly, means:
123
456
789
You could make a function for that which returns a bool.
Note: I'm currently developing under C#, that's why it's probably easiest to realize especially this concept under C#, although other platforms need none up to barely some modification to this.

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