Extracting Lines, Contours, and Components

In order to perform a content-based analysis of an image, it is necessary to extract meaningful features from the collection of pixels that constitute the image. Contours, lines, blobs, and so on, are fundamental image primitives that can be used to describe the elements contained in an image. This chapter will teach you how to extract some of these important image features.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Detecting image contours with the Canny operator
• Detecting lines in images with the Hough transform
• Fitting a line to a set of points
• Extracting the components' contours
• Computing components' shape descriptors

Detecting image contours with the Canny operator

Edges carry important visual information since they delineate the image elements. For this reason, they can be used, for example, in object recognition. However, simple binary edge maps suffer from two main drawbacks. First, the edges that are detected are unnecessarily thick; this makes the object's limit more difficult to identify. Second, and more importantly, it is often impossible to find a threshold that is sufficiently low in order to detect all important edges of an image and is, at the same time, sufficiently high in order to not include too many insignificant edges. This is a trade-off problem that the Canny algorithm tries to solve.

How to do it...

The Canny...

Detecting lines in images with the Hough transform

In our human-made world, planar and linear structures are in abundance. As a result, straight lines are frequently visible in images. These are meaningful features that play an important role in object recognition and image understanding. The Hough transform is a classic algorithm that is often used to detect these particular features in images. It was initially developed to detect lines in images and, as we will see, it can also be extended to detect other simple image structures.

Getting ready

With the Hough transform, lines are represented using the following equation:

The ρ parameter is the distance between the line and the image origin (the upper-left corner),...

Fitting a line to a set of points

In some applications, it could be important to not only detect lines in an image but also to obtain an accurate estimate of the line's position and orientation. This recipe will show you how to find the line that best fits a given set of points.

How to do it...

The first thing to do is to identify points in an image that seem to be aligned along a straight line. Let's use one of the lines we detected in the preceding recipe. The lines detected using cv::HoughLinesP are contained in std::vector<cv::Vec4i> called lines:

1. To extract the set of points that seem to belong to, let's say, the first of these lines, we can proceed as follows. We draw a white line on a black image...

Extracting the components' contours

Images generally contain representations of objects. One of the goals of image analysis is to identify and extract these objects. In object detection/recognition applications, the first step is often to produce a binary image that shows you where certain objects of interest could be located. No matter how this binary map is obtained (for example, from the histogram back projection as we did in Chapter 4, Counting the Pixels with Histograms, or from motion analysis as we will learn in Chapter 11, Reconstructing 3D Scenes), the next step is to extract the objects that are contained in this collection of one's and zero's. Consider, for example, the image of buffaloes in a binary form that we manipulated in Chapter 5, Transforming Images with Morphological Operations, as shown in the following image:

We obtained this image from a...

Computing components' shape descriptors

A connected component often corresponds to the image of some object in a pictured scene. To identify this object, or to compare it with other image elements, it can be useful to perform some measurements on the component in order to extract some of its characteristics. In this recipe, we will look at some of the shape descriptors available in OpenCV that can be used to describe the shape of a connected component.

How to do it...

Many OpenCV functions are available when it comes to shaping description. We will apply some of them on the components that we have extracted in the preceding recipe. In particular, we will use our vector of four contours corresponding to the four buffaloes...