Is it possible to analyse an image and determine the position of a car inside it?
If so, how would you approach this problem?
I'm working with a relatively small data-set (50-100) and most images will look similar to the following examples:
I'm mostly interested in only detecting vertical coordinates, not the actual shape of the car. For example, this is the area I want to highlight as my final output:
You could try OpenCV which has an object detection API. But you would need to "train" it...by supplying it with a large set of images that contained "cars".
http://docs.opencv.org/modules/objdetect/doc/objdetect.html
http://robocv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/real-time-object-detection-in-opencv.html
http://blog.davidjbarnes.com/2010/04/opencv-haartraining-object-detection.html
Look at the 2nd link above and it shows an example of detecting and creating a bounding box around the object....you could use that as a basis for what you want to do.
http://www.behance.net/gallery/Vehicle-Detection-Tracking-and-Counting/4057777
Various papers:
http://cbcl.mit.edu/publications/theses/thesis-masters-leung.pdf
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/wi08/cse190-a/reports/scheung.pdf
Various image databases:
http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/Data/Car/
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/Imagedbase.htm
http://cbcl.mit.edu/software-datasets/CarData.html
1) Your first and second images have two cars in them.
2) If you only have 50-100 images, I can almost guarantee that classifying them all by hand will be faster than writing or adapting an algorithm to recognize cars and deliver coordinates.
3) If you're determined to do this with computer vision, I'd recommend OpenCV. Tutorial here: http://docs.opencv.org/doc/tutorials/tutorials.html
You can use openCV latentSVM detector to detect the car and plot a bounding box around it:
http://docs.opencv.org/modules/objdetect/doc/latent_svm.html
No need to train a new model using HaarCascade, as there is already a trained model for cars:
https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_extra/tree/master/testdata/cv/latentsvmdetector/models_VOC2007
This is a supervised machine learning problem. You will need to use an API that features learning algorithms as colinsmith suggested or do some research and write on of your own. Python is pretty good for machine learning (it's what I use, personally) and has some nice tools like scikit: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/
I'd suggest for you to look into HAAR classifiers. Since you mentioned you have a set of 50-100 images, you can use this to build up a training dataset for the classifier and use it to classify your images.
You can also look into SURF and SIFT algorithms for the specified problem.
Related
The classification using the libsvm is always wrong and it never changes the predicted label.(ex. I have 7 emotions, when i try to predict an image from outside the dataset it gives me 4. which is happy emotion, I tried an image from the dataset and the same label is the result)
I extratced the image features using the gabor filter with orientation 6 and scale 4.
I used a script grid.py to find the optimal values for cost and gamma
Finally i used the parameters in the last step in training and get model
./svm-train -c 8 -g 0.03214 svm.train model.model
I tried to change the kernal function and svm-type but it's still the same problem.
Is there any relation between number of features i use in training and number of images in dataset?
Note:I used the japanese women facial expression dataset.
I don't think you want to use SVM for image classification. The task you describe (detecting emotions on image) require you to feed extremely good features to your SVM to learn from, gabor filter won't do this.
I suggest you to try a deep learning approach - for example you may wish to try a convolutional neural network for this. These thing is able to extract features out of raw image and then use them to classify the images.
Check this out:
http://danielnouri.org/notes/2014/12/17/using-convolutional-neural-nets-to-detect-facial-keypoints-tutorial/
Here they use DNN to find the facial key points on image (i.e. location of eyes, nose tip etc.). You may want to adjust the code a little so that it just classifies your images.
Once again, the power of DNN is that it acts both as feature extractor and as a classifier. It is an incredibly powerful tool for image recognition tasks, unlike the SWM of any type.
I'm trying to detect players in soccer game with javacv using HOG Descriptor. I already implemented the method with the default people detector, but, the results are not satisfying. So, I extracted positive and negative images and I want to extract features using this images.
Do anyone have any ideas on how to do this please? Thanks!
You are actually implementing the idea published in this paper.
An (extended) sample code can be found at UCI
To summarize:
You have to generate a positive and a negative training set. This means in the positive training images you have to know where the players are located.
Then you have to extract the HoG features at the players position. Note the original HoG method takes input patches of size 128x64, so ensure that your players are all scaled to the same size. And important: HoG feature size depends on the extraction window size, so keep it fixed!
Store the information in a data structure with corresponding label 1.
Then extract negative features from negative images and store them with corresponding label 0 or -1.
Use some training method. I currently work with a linear support vector machine similar to liblinear: SVM
Then use the test set to ensure you are getting correct results. For testing use a sliding window and slide it all over the image and score the extracted features. Take the best score, as it is most likely, that the player is located there.
If you want to detect several players in one image use non maximum suppression.
Note: HoG features are quite difficult to handle, as small changes in extraction might have a great impact on performance. For example openCV ships with an (undocumented) HoG detector. HoG visualization helped me to understand how it works.
EDIT: fixed HoG visualization link
First question here so sorry if anything I ask is completely stupid.
I'm working in a shape recognition project where it is supposed for me to develop an application that receives two images: an original one and a sketch made by a user. I am supposed to detect contours of the two images and find the best match in the original image corresponding to the sketch made by the user.
I am already learning some basics about the Canny edge detection and was able to get the contours of several images. After having the contours, I need to analyze all contours in the image and find the best match, disregarding translation, rotation, scaling and occlusion.
Then, I found this code that does exactly what I want:
http://www.morethantechnical.com/2012/12/27/2d-curve-matching-in-opencv-w-code/ but is in C++.
Do you know any alternative for similar code in Java or any algorithm that could be useful to me? I also discovered BoofCV but it seems that such task is not implemented.
Thank you for your patience.
EDIT:
I've been searching for other ways of doing this, and I found the Hausdorff distance:
http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/teaching/cg-projects/98/normand/main.html
Is it possible to modify this algorithm to be rotation invariant? They only talk about translation and scaling.
As you mentioned you already have the source code in C++ and can't find a Java version - possibly your best bet might be to convert the C++ code into Java code. If you don't need all parts of the C++ program, you might want to covert only the parts (classes) that you need.
Conversion from C++ to Java might not be always trivial but I am guessing it might be easier if you know exactly what you want and how you want your program to behave. Below is a link to some conversion tools - although they might not be free.
http://www.researchgate.net/post/How_to_convert_the_C_C_code_to_java2
I want to implement object detection in license plate (the city name) . I have an image:
and I want to detect if the image contains the word "بابل":
I have tried using a template matching method using OpenCV and also using MATLAB but the result is poor when tested with other images.
I have also read this page, but I was not able to get a good understanding of what to do from that.
Can anyone help me or give me a step by step way to solve that?
I have a project to recognize the license plate and we can recognize and detect the numbers but I need to detect and recognize the words (it is the same words with more cars )
Your question is very broad, but I will do my best to explain optical character recognition (OCR) in a programmatic context and give you a general project workflow followed by successful OCR algorithms.
The problem you face is easier than most, because instead of having to recognize/differentiate between different characters, you only have to recognize a single image (assuming this is the only city you want to recognize). You are, however, subject to many of the limitations of any image recognition algorithm (quality, lighting, image variation).
Things you need to do:
1) Image isolation
You'll have to isolate your image from a noisy background:
I think that the best isolation technique would be to first isolate the license plate, and then isolate the specific characters you're looking for. Important things to keep in mind during this step:
Does the license plate always appear in the same place on the car?
Are cars always in the same position when the image is taken?
Is the word you are looking for always in the same spot on the license plate?
The difficulty/implementation of the task depends greatly on the answers to these three questions.
2) Image capture/preprocessing
This is a very important step for your particular implementation. Although possible, it is highly unlikely that your image will look like this:
as your camera would have to be directly in front of the license plate. More likely, your image may look like one of these:
depending on the perspective where the image is taken from. Ideally, all of your images will be taken from the same vantage point and you'll simply be able to apply a single transform so that they all look similar (or not apply one at all). If you have photos taken from different vantage points, you need to manipulate them or else you will be comparing two different images. Also, especially if you are taking images from only one vantage point and decide not to do a transform, make sure that the text your algorithm is looking for is transformed to be from the same point-of-view. If you don't, you'll have an not-so-great success rate that's difficult to debug/figure out.
3) Image optimization
You'll probably want to (a) convert your images to black-and-white and (b) reduce the noise of your images. These two processes are called binarization and despeckling, respectively. There are many implementations of these algorithms available in many different languages, most accessible by a Google search. You can batch process your images using any language /free tool if you want, or find an implementation that works with whatever language you decide to work in.
4) Pattern recognition
If you only want to search for the name of this one city (only one word ever), you'll most likely want to implement a matrix matching strategy. Many people also refer to matrix matching as pattern recognition so you may have heard it in this context before. Here is an excellent paper detailing an algorithmic implementation that should help you immensely should you choose to use matrix matching. The other algorithm available is feature extraction, which attempts to identify words based on patterns within letters (i.e. loops, curves, lines). You might use this if the font style of the word on the license plate ever changes, but if the same font will always be used, I think matrix matching will have the best results.
5) Algorithm training
Depending on the approach you take (if you use a learning algorithm), you may need to train your algorithm with data that is tagged. What this means is that you have a series of images that you've identified as True (contains city name) or False (does not). Here's a psuedocode example of how this works:
train = [(img1, True), (img2, True), (img3, False), (img4, False)]
img_recognizer = algorithm(train)
Then, you apply your trained algorithm to identify untagged images.
test_untagged = [img5, img6, img7]
for image in test_untagged:
img_recognizer(image)
Your training sets should be much larger than four data points; in general, the bigger the better. Just make sure, as I said before, that all the images are of an identical transformation.
Here is a very, very high-level code flow that may be helpful in implementing your algorithm:
img_in = capture_image()
cropped_img = isolate(img_in)
scaled_img = normalize_scale(cropped_img)
img_desp = despeckle(scaled_img)
img_final = binarize(img_desp)
#train
match() = train_match(training_set)
boolCity = match(img_final)
The processes above have been implemented many times and are thoroughly documented in many languages. Below are some implementations in the languages tagged in your question.
Pure Java
cvBlob in OpenCV (check out this tutorial and this blog post too)
tesseract-ocr in C++
Matlab OCR
Good luck!
If you ask "I want to detect if the image contains the word "بابل" - this is classic problem which is solved using http://code.opencv.org/projects/opencv/wiki/FaceDetection like classifier.
But I assume you still want more. Years ago I tried to solve simiar problems and I provide example image to show how good/bad it was:
To detected licence plate I used very basic rectangle detection which is included in every OpenCV samples folder. And then used perspective transform to fix layout and size. It was important to implement multiple checks to see if rectangle looks good enough to be licence plate. For example if rectangle is 500px tall and 2px wide, then probably this is not what I want and was rejected.
Use https://code.google.com/p/cvblob/ to extract arabic text and other components on detected plate. I just had similar need yesterday on other project. I had to extract Japanese kanji symbols from page:
CvBlob does a lot of work for you.
Next step use technique explained http://blog.damiles.com/2008/11/basic-ocr-in-opencv/ to match city name. Just teach algorithm with example images of different city names and soon it will tell 99% of them just out of box. I have used similar approaches on different projects and quite sure they work
I'm looking for several methods to compare two images to see how similar they are. Currently I plan to have percentages as the 'similarity index' end-result. My program outline is something like this:
User selects 2 images to compare.
With a button, the images are compared using several different methods.
At the end, each method will have a percentage next to it indicating how similar the images are based on that method.
I've done a lot of reading lately and some of the stuff I've read seems to be incredibly complex and advanced and not for someone like me with only about a year's worth of Java experience. So far I've read about:
The Fourier Transform - im finding this rather confusing to implement in Java, but apparently the Java Advanced Imaging API has a class for it. Though I'm not sure how to convert the output to an actual result
SIFT algorithm - seems incredibly complex
Histograms - probably the easiest out of all mentioned so far
Pixel grabbing - seems viable but if theres a considerable amount of variation between the two images it doesn't look like it's going to produce any sort of accurate result. I might be wrong?
I also have the idea of pre-processing an image using a Sobel filter first, then comparing it. Problem is the actual comparing part.
So yeah I'm looking to see if anyone has ideas for comparing images in Java. Hoping that there are people here that have done similar projects before. I just want to get some input on viable comparison techniques that arent too hard to implement in Java.
Thanks in advance
Fourier Transform - This can be used to efficiently can compute the cross-correlation, which will tell you how to align the two images and how similar they are, when they are optimally aligned.
Sift descriptors - These can be used to compare local features. They are often used for correspondence analysis and object recognition. (See also SURF)
Histograms - The normalized cross-correlation often yields good results for comparing images on a global level. But since you are just comparing color distributions you could end up declaring an outdoor scene with lots of snow as similar to an indoor scene with lots of white wallpaper...
Pixel grabbing - No idea what this is...
You can get a good overview from this paper. Another field you might to look into is content based image retrieval (CBIR).
Sorry for not being Java specific. HTH.
As a better alternative to simple pixel grabbing, try SSIM. It does require that your images are essentially of the same object from the same angle, however. It's useful if you're comparing images that have been compressed with different algorithms, for example (e.g. JPEG vs JPEG2000). Also, it's a fairly simple approach that you should be able to implement reasonably quickly to see some results.
I don't know of a Java implementation, but there's a C++ implementation using OpenCV. You could try to re-use that (through something like javacv) or just write it from scratch. The algorithm itself isn't that complicated anyway, so you should be able to implement it directly.