I need to scan a special object within my android application.
I thought about using OpenCV but it is scanning all objects inside the view of the camera. I only need the camera to regognize a rectangular piece of paper.
How can i do that?
My first thought was: How do barcode scanners work? They are able to regognize the barcode area and automatically take a picture when the barcode is inside a predefined area of the screen and when its sharp. I guess it must be possible to transfer that to my problem (tell me if im wrong).
So step by step:
Open custom camera application
Scan objects inside the view of the camera
Recognize the rectangular piece of paper
If paper is inside a predefined area and sharp -> take a picture
I would combine this with audio. If the camera recognized the paper make some noice like a peep or something and the more the object is fitting the predefined area the faster the peep sound is played. That would make taking pictures for blind people possible.
Hope someone got ideas on that.
OpenCV is an image processing framework/library. It does not "scan all objects inside the view of the camera". By itself it does nothing and yet it gives the use of a number of useful functions, many of which could be used for your specified application.
If the image is not cluttered and nothing is on the paper, I would look into using edge detection (i.e. Canny or similar) or even colour blobs (even though colour is never a good idea, if your application is always for white uncovered paper, it should work robustly).
OpenCV does add some overhead, but it would allow you to quickly use functions for a simple solution.
Related
I'm building an Android app that has to identify, in realtime, a mark/pattern which will be on the four corners of a visiting card. I'm using a preview stream of the rear camera of the phone as input.
I want to overlay a small circle on the screen where the mark is present. This is similar to how reference dots will be shown on screen by a QR reader at the corner points of the QR code preview.
I'm aware about how to get the frames from camera using native Android SDK, but I have no clue about the processing which needs to be done and optimization for real time detection. I tried messing around with OpenCV and there seems to be a bit of lag in its preview frames.
So I'm trying to write a native algorithm usint raw pixel values from the frame. Is this advisable? The mark/pattern will always be the same in my case. Please guide me with the algorithm to use to find the pattern.
The below image shows my pattern along with some details (ratios) about the same (same as the one used in QR, but I'm having it at 4 corners instead of 3)
I think one approach is to find black and white pixels in the ratio mentioned below to detect the mark and find coordinates of its center, but I have no idea how to code it in Android. I looking forward for an optimized approach for real-time recognition and display.
Any help is much appreciated! Thanks
Detecting patterns on four corners of a visiting card:
Assuming background is white, you can simply try this method.
Needs to be done and optimization for real time detection:
Yes, you need OpenCV
Here is an example of real-time marker detection on Google Glass using OpenCV
In this example, image showing in tablet has delay (blutooth), Google Glass preview is much faster than that of tablet. But, still have lag.
It seems I've found myself in the deep weeds of the Google Vision API for barcode scanning. Perhaps my mind is a bit fried after looking at all sorts of alternative libraries (ZBar, ZXing, and even some for-cost third party implementations), but I'm having some difficulty finding any information on where I can implement some sort of scan region limiting.
The use case is a pretty simple one: if I'm a user pointing my phone at a box with multiple barcodes of the same type (think shipping labels here), I want to explicitly point some little viewfinder or alignment straight-edge on the screen at exactly the thing I'm trying to capture, without having to worry about anything outside that area of interest giving me some scan results I don't want.
The above case is handled in most other Android libraries I've seen, taking in either a Rect with relative or absolute coordinates, and this is also a part of iOS' AVCapture metadata results system (it uses a relative CGRect, but really the same concept).
I've dug pretty deep into the sample app for the barcode-reader
here, but the implementation is a tad opaque to get anything but the high level implementation details down.
It seems an ugly patch to, on successful detection of a barcode anywhere within the camera's preview frame, to simple no-op on barcodes outside of an area of interest, since the device is still working hard to compute those frames.
Am I missing something very simple and obvious on this one? Any ideas on a way to implement this cleanly, otherwise?
Many thanks for your time in reading through this!
The API currently does not have an option to limit the detection area. But you could crop the preview image before it gets passed into the barcode detector. See here for an outline of how to wrap a detector with your own class:
Mobile Vision API - concatenate new detector object to continue frame processing
You'd implement the "detect" method to take the frame received from the camera, create a cropped version of the frame, and pass that through to the underlying detector.
What I am doing is attempting to using EMGU to perform and AbsDiff of two images.
Given the following conditions:
User starts their webcam and with the webcam stationary takes a picture.
User moves into the frame and takes another picture (WebCam has NOT moved).
AbsDiff works well but what I'm finding is that the ISO adjustments and White Balance adjustments made by certain cameras (even on Android and iPhone) are uncontrollable to a degree.
Therefore instead of fighting a losing battle I'd like to attempt some image post processing to see if I can equalize the two.
I found the following thread but it's not helping me much: How do I equalize contrast & brightness of images using opencv?
Can anyone offer specific details of what functions/methods/approach to take using EMGUCV?
I've tried using things like _EqualizeHist(). This yields very poor results.
Instead of equalizing the histograms for each image individually, I'd like to compare the brightness/contrast values and come up with an average that gets applied to both.
I'm not looking for someone to do the work for me (although code example would CERTAINLY be appreciated). I'm looking for either exact guidance or some way to point the ship in the right direction.
Thanks for your time.
I am developing an android camera app. The camera pictures are later processed by OCR, so the picture must be as sharp as possible.
If you shake the camera, it looks as if the digital camera overlays multiple images, to create the effect of motion blur:
Example 1: http://i.stack.imgur.com/nqrmd.jpg
Example 2: http://i.stack.imgur.com/ZBx6F.jpg
If you examine the pictures closely, the motion blur looks to consist of 2 or 3 images taken in quick succession and blended together to simulate light exposure. I understand that this amounts to the way digital cameras work.
But I'd prefer having a single crisp image rather than a properly exposed one. The app can use histogram corrections to make the text readable again for OCR. The image does not have to appeal to the human eye.
Is there a way to better control the camera to get these sort of raw image snapshots?
I had some limited success using the "Action" scene mode on the camera. Not much, but it's as far as you can get.
I am looking for some kind of auto trim/crop functionality in android.
Which detects a object in captured image and creates a square box around object for
cropping. I have found face detection apis in android, but my problem is captured images are documents/pages not human faces so how can I detected documents or any other object from captured picture.
I am thinking of any algorithms for object detection or some color detection. Is there any apis or libraries available for it.
I have tried following link but not found any desired output.
Find and Crop relevant image area automatically (Java / Android)
https://github.com/biokys/cropimage
Any small hint would also help me alot. Please help. Thanks in advance
That depends on what you intend to capture and crop, but there are many ways to achieve this. Like littleimp suggested, you should use OpenCv for the effect.
I suggest you use edge-detection algorithms, such as Sobel, and perform image transformation on it with, for example, a Threshold function that will turn the image into a binary one (only black and white). Afterwards, you can search the image for the geometric shape you want, using what's suggested here. Filter the object you want by calculating the detected geometric figure's area and ratio.
It would help a lot to know what you're trying to detect in an image. Those methods I described were the ones I used for my specific case, which was developing an algorithm to detect and crop the license plate from a given vehicle image. It works close to perfect and it was all done by using OpenCV.
If you have anything else you'd like to know, don't hesitate to ask. I'm watching this post :)
Use OpenCV for android.
You can use the Watershed (Imgproc.watershed) function to segment the image into foreground and background. Then you can crop around the foreground (which will be the document).
The watershed algorithm needs some markers pre-defining the regions. You can for example assume the document to be in the middle of the image, so create a marked region in the middle of the image to get the watershed algorithm started.