Bitmap (of a signature) comparison in c# - c#

We have a for fun project which require us to compare two black and white bitmaps of two signature and say whether they are the same persons signature. As this is just two loaded bitmaps rather than data captured from a tablet the approach is going to be a little different to normal signature recognition.
I am thinking it would require the following steps
Crop the bitmaps to just the signature
Try to work out some kind of rotation to align them
Resize to make the cropped / rotated bitmaps the same
Analyse the signature inside (maybe by breaking down into a grid)
Does anyone have any thoughts on this project? How to best do the rotation, comparison etc? Seen anything similar?

You may want to look at:SOMs for interesting pics (:D) as well as an example of how to compare image similarities.
There are two main types of Neural Networks - supervise and unsupervised. SOMs are unsupervised. Depending on your situation, you might want to take a look at supervised Neural Networks NNs are common, and quite straightforward to implement for the most part.

Related

Generate heatmap using canvas in WPF

I want to know how can I generate a heatmap on a canvas in WPF (.NET)
I have an array of points (coordinates) with the color intensity, with these data I want to create something similar to this
But, I found that there is no tutorial or library to generate them on a canvas..
I am very sorry, but you have it wrong. WPF canvas is a sandbox for higher level objects, not points. So there are rectangles, circles, ellipses, lines, polylines etc, but more you put in, slower it gets. Now an image like an heat map could use tens of thousands points or even millions of points and that would be a pretty bad idea to play with it directly in canvas. For this kind manipulation, you need pixels to play with and it means special kind of container, like WritableImage. Please look on the link.
This kind container/class is capable manipulate efficiently with pixels, and that is the way it should be done.
Please note, that there are multiple kinds of bitmap containers for WPF.

Get all pixel in shape

i have 4 shapes in image
i want to get pixels of one shape in list of point
the shapes have same color
List<point> GetAllPixelInShape(point x)
{
//imp
}
where x point of this shape
Long story short, you could begin with a connected components / region labeling algorithm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connected-component_labeling
In OpenCV you can call findContours() to identify contours, which are the borders of your connected regions.
http://dasl.mem.drexel.edu/~noahKuntz/openCVTut7.html
OCR is an extremely difficult task, especially for a script like Arabic. Creating an OCR algorithm from scratch takes a lot of work and numerous algorithms working together. OCR for machine printed text is hard enough. Implementing an algorithm to read handwriting is not something I'd suggest trying until you have a year or two of image processing experience. If you haven't read textbooks and academic papers on OCR, you're likely to spend a lot of time reproducing work that has already been done.
If you're not familiar with contour tracing and/or blob analysis, then working with OpenCV may not be a good first step. Since you have a specific goal in mind, you might first try different algorithms in a user-friendly GUI that will save you coding time.
Consider downloading ImageJ so that you can see how the algorithms work. There are plugins for a variety of common image processing algorithms.
http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/
Your proposed method signature doesn't provide enough information to solve this. Your method will need to know the bounds of your shape, how long and wide it is etc, ideally a set of points that indicate those bounds.
Once you have those, you could potentially apply the details of this article, in particular the algorithms specified in the answer to solve your problem.

search for shapes in BMP image file

I have an image processing question, using C#.
Say I have some schematic diagrams in BMP format, the diagram contains component shapes which are connected to each other.
I wrote a simple program to detect square shapes in the diagram as one component, and record the location of it. However, the next level is to detect more complicated shapes like a few arcs joined together. Note that these shapes can be different sizes in the image. Does anyone know any good method of doing it? without downloading any library (this is my limitation now).
After detecting the shapes, I also need to record which shape is connected to which, so later on, I can redraw them. I have one week to do this, so thanks a lot for any help!!
I'm using C#.
Have a look at this paper. My understanding of their approach:
Detect edges
Detect corners by looking for perpendicular edges
Detect polygons by looking for groups of corners
Detect circles using Hough transform
This is a fairly difficult research problem. Even with a powerful computer vision library like OpenCV, implementing an effective solution within 1 week would be a demanding task.
Have you taken a look at using EmguCV? It is an open-source C# wrapper of OpenCV. It also has a shape detection sample you might interested in.
To answer an old post I had, I have done what I needed to do in 2 weeks time, it worked well. I actually ended up using different algorithms for different shapes. The algorithms are a bit self inventions, but a good method I want to mention is that get the histogram and then use projection on different axis helped a lot.

Continued - Vehicle License Plate Detection

Continuing from this thread:
What are good algorithms for vehicle license plate detection?
I've developed my image manipulation techniques to emphasise the license plate as much as possible, and overall I'm happy with it, here are two samples.
Now comes the most difficult part, actually detecting the license plate. I know there are a few edge detection methods, but my maths is quite poor so I'm unable to translate some of the complex formulas into code.
My idea so far is to loop through every pixel within the image (for loop based on img width & height) From this compare each pixel against a list of colours, from this an algorithm is checked to see if the colors keep differentiating between the license plate white, and the black of the text. If this happens to be true these pixels are built into a new bitmap within memory, then an OCR scan is performed once this pattern has stopped being detected.
I'd appreciate some input on this as it might be a flawed idea, too slow or intensive.
Thanks
Your method of "see if the colors keep differentiating between the license plate white, and the black of the text" is basically searching for areas where the pixel intensity changes from black to white and vice-versa many times. Edge detection can accomplish essentially the same thing. However, implementing your own methods is still a good idea because you will learn a lot in the process. Heck, why not do both and compare the output of your method with that of some ready-made edge detection algorithm?
At some point you will want to have a binary image, say with black pixels corresponding to the "not-a-character" label, and white pixels corresponding to the "is-a-character" label. Perhaps the simplest way to do that is to use a thresholding function. But that will only work well if the characters have already been emphasized in some way.
As someone mentioned in your other thread, you can do that using the black hat operator, which results in something like this:
If you threshold the image above with, say, Otsu's method (which automatically determines a global threshold level), you get this:
There are several ways to clean that image. For instance, you can find the connected components and throw away those that are too small, too big, too wide or too tall to be a character:
Since the characters in your image are relatively large and fully connected this method works well.
Next, you could filter the remaining components based on the properties of the neighbors until you have the desired number of components (= number of characters). If you want to recognize the character, you could then calculate features for each character and input them to a classifier, which usually is built with supervised learning.
All the steps above are just one way to do it, of course.
By the way, I generated the images above using OpenCV + Python, which is a great combination for computer vision.
Colour, as much as looks good, will present quite some challenges with shading and light conditions. Depends really how much you want to make it robust but real world cases have to deal with such issues.
I have done research on road footage (see my profile page and look here for sample) and have found that the real-world road footage is extremely noisy in terms of light conditions and your colours can change from Brown to White for a yellow back-number-plate.
Most algorithms use line detection and try to find a box with an aspect ratio within an acceptable range.
I suggest you do a literature review on the subject but this was achieved back in 1993 (if I remember correctly) so there will be thousands of articles.
This is quite a scientific domain so just an algorithm will not solve it and you will needs numerous pre/post processing steps.
In brief, my suggestion is to use Hough transform to find lines and then try to look for rectangles that could create acceptable aspect ratio.
Harris feature detection could provide important edges but if the car is light-coloured this will not work.
If you have a lot of samples, you could try to check face detection method developed by Paul Viola and Michael Jones. It's good for face detection, maybe it'll do fine with license plate detection (especially if combined with some other method)

Finding Sub-Images in a image

I have a fairly simple situation. I just don't know any specific terms to search for.
I have a single image, in that image I have several other images that follow a basic pattern.
They are rectangles and will possibly have landmark image to base things off of.
An important part, is that I need to detect rotated/mis-scaled sub-images.
Basically what I need to be able to do is split 'business cards' from a single image into properly aligned single images.
As I am also designing the cards to be scanned I can put in whatever symbol or something that would make detection easier (as I said a landmark)
If your example is representative (which I doubt for some reason) then Hough transform is your friend (google it, there are plenty of explanations and code around). With it you'll be able to detect the rectangles.
Some examples of Hough transform in C# are http://www.koders.com/csharp/fid3A88BC1FF95FCA9D6A182698263A40EE7883CF26.aspx and http://www.shedletsky.com/hough/index.html
If what actually happens is that you scan some cards, and you have some control over the process, then I'd suggest that you ensure there is no overlap between cards, and provide a contrasting background (something very different from the cards). Then any edge-detection will get you close enough to what you've drawn in your example, and after that you can use Hough transform.
Alternatively, you can implement the paper http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.59.4239 which uses Hough transform to detect rectangles directly, without edge detection.
If I did not understand your problem, or you need clarifications, please edit your question further and post a comment on this answer.
Try AForge.NET (if you are using C#). It has DocumentSkewChecker which will calculate the angle of rotated image.
You can try ExhaustiveTemplateMatching class of AForge.Net

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