OpenCV detect image against a image set

Question

I would like to know how I can use OpenCV to detect on my VideoCamera a Image. The Image can be one of 500 images.

What I'm doing at the moment:

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    // Do any additional setup after loading the view.
    self.videoCamera = [[CvVideoCamera alloc] initWithParentView:imageView];
    self.videoCamera.delegate = self;
    self.videoCamera.defaultAVCaptureDevicePosition = AVCaptureDevicePositionBack;
    self.videoCamera.defaultAVCaptureSessionPreset = AVCaptureSessionPresetHigh;
    self.videoCamera.defaultAVCaptureVideoOrientation = AVCaptureVideoOrientationPortrait;
    self.videoCamera.defaultFPS = 30;
    self.videoCamera.grayscaleMode = NO;
}

-(void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated{
    [super viewDidAppear:animated];
    [self.videoCamera start];
}

#pragma mark - Protocol CvVideoCameraDelegate

#ifdef __cplusplus
- (void)processImage:(cv::Mat&)image;
{
    // Do some OpenCV stuff with the image
    cv::Mat image_copy;
    cvtColor(image, image_copy, CV_BGRA2BGR);

    // invert image
    //bitwise_not(image_copy, image_copy);
    //cvtColor(image_copy, image, CV_BGR2BGRA);
}
#endif

The images that I would like to detect are 2-5kb small. Few got text on them but others are just signs. Here a example:

Do you guys know how I can do that?

Answer 1

There are several things in here. I will break down your problem and point you towards some possible solutions.

1. Classification: Your main task consists on determining if a certain image belongs to a class. This problem by itself can be decomposed in several problems:

   • Feature Representation You need to decide how you are gonna model your feature, i.e. how are you going to represent each image in a feature space so you can train a classifier to separate those classes. The feature representation by itself is already a big design decision. One could (i) calculate the histogram of the images using n bins and train a classifier or (ii) you could choose a sequence of random patches comparison such as in a random forest. However, after the training, you need to evaluate the performance of your algorithm to see how good your decision was.

   • There is a known problem called overfitting, which is when you learn too well that you can not generalize your classifier. This can usually be avoided with cross-validation. If you are not familiar with the concept of false positive or false negative, take a look in this article.

   • Once you define your feature space, you need to choose an algorithm to train that data and this might be considered as your biggest decision. There are several algorithms coming out every day. To name a few of the classical ones: Naive Bayes, SVM, Random Forests, and more recently the community has obtained great results using Deep learning. Each one of those have their own specific usage (e.g. SVM ares great for binary classification) and you need to be familiar with the problem. You can start with simple assumptions such as independence between random variables and train a Naive Bayes classifier to try to separate your images.

2. Patches: Now you mentioned that you would like to recognize the images on your webcam. If you are going to print the images and display in a video, you need to handle several things. it is necessary to define patches on your big image (input from the webcam) in which you build a feature representation for each patch and classify in the same way you did in the previous step. For doing that, you could slide a window and classify all the patches to see if they belong to the negative class or to one of the positive ones. There are other alternatives.

3. Scale: Considering that you are able to detect the location of images in the big image and classify it, the next step is to relax the toy assumption of fixes scale. To handle a multiscale approach, you could image pyramid which pretty much allows you to perform the detection in multiresolution. Alternative approaches could consider keypoint detectors, such as SIFT and SURF. Inside SIFT, there is an image pyramid which allows the invariance.

4. Projection So far we assumed that you had images under orthographic projection, but most likely you will have slight perspective projections which will make the whole previous assumption fail. One naive solution for that would be for instance detect the corners of the white background of your image and rectify the image before building the feature vector for classification. If you used SIFT or SURF, you could design a way of avoiding explicitly handling that. Nevertheless, if your input is gonna be just squares patches, such as in ARToolkit, I would go for manual rectification.

I hope I might have given you a better picture of your problem.

Answer 2

I would recommend using SURF for that, because pictures can be on different distances form your camera, i.e changing the scale. I had one similar experiment and SURF worked just as expected. But SURF has very difficult adjustment (and expensive operations), you should try different setups before you get the needed results.
Here is a link: http://docs.opencv.org/modules/nonfree/doc/feature_detection.html
youtube video (in C#, but can give an idea): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjxWpKCQqJc

Answer 3

I might not be qualified enough to answer this problem. Last time I seriously use OpenCV it was still 1.1. But just some thought on it, and hope it would help (currently I am interested in DIP and ML).

I think it will probably an easier task if you only need to classify an image, if the image is just one from (or very similar to) your 500 images. For this you could use SVM or some neural network (Felix already gave an excellent enumeration on that).

However, your problem seems to be that you need to first find this candidate image in your webcam, the location of which you have little clue beforehand. (let us know whether it is so. I think it is important.)

If so, the harder problem is the detection/localization of your candidate image. I don't have a general solution for that. The first thing I would do is to see if there is some common feature in your 500 images (e.g., whether all of them enclosed by a red circle, or, half of them have circle and half of them have rectangle). If this can be done, the problem will be simpler (it would be similar to face detection problem, which have good solution).

In other words, this means that you first classify the 500 images to a few groups with common feature (by human), and detect the group first, then scale and use above mentioned technique to classify them into fine result. In this way, it will be more computationally acceptable than trying to detect 500 images one by one.

BTW, this ppt would help to give a visual clue of what is going on for feature extraction and image matching http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse455/09wi/Lects/lect6.pdf.

Answer 4

1. Detect vs recognize: detecting the image is just finding it on the background and from your comments I realized you may have your sings surrounded by the background. It might facilitate your algorithm if you can somehow crop your signs from the background (detect) before trying to recognize them. Recognizing is a next stage that presumes you can classify the cropped image correctly as the one seen before.

2. If you need real time speed and scale/rotation invariance neither SIFT no SURF will do this fast. Nowadays you can do much better if you shift the burden of image processing to a learning stage as was done by Lepitit. In short, he subjected each pattern to a bunch of affine transformations and trained a binary classification tree to recognize each point correctly by doing a lot of binary comparison tests. Trees are extremely fast and a way to go not to mention that most of the processing is done offline. This method is also more robust to off-plane rotations than SIFT or SURF. You will also learn about tree classification which may facilitate you last processing stage.

3. Finally a recognition stage is based not only on the number of matches but also on their geometric consistency. Since your signs look flat I suggest finding either affine or homography transformation that has most inliers when calculated between matched points.

Looking at your code though I realized that you may not follow any of these recommendations. It may be a good starting point for you to read about decision trees and then play with some sample code (see mushroom.cpp in the above mentioned link)