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Detect Images in an image of a text document

asked 2015-11-05 16:26:08 -0600

rasterdetect gravatar image

updated 2017-08-01 05:21:26 -0600

I have the following image of a document

image description

And I want to be able to detect the images at the top of the page. I tried using line detection using erosion and dilation to get bounding boxes around the images but that did not work because the edge of the images contain many different colors, so the detected lines do not form a box.

Can anyone think of a better approach to detecting these images. Perhaps exploiting the fact that the images have color and the rest of the document is black and white. However, a this approach would not be ideal for the case when the images themselves are black and white.

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answered 2015-11-05 18:02:46 -0600

LorenaGdL gravatar image

Text and tables are easy to remove using dilate() function. And then I guess there are multiple solutions, but this is what I've done and achieved:

Mat image = imread("page.png");
Mat gray;
cvtColor(image, gray, CV_BGR2GRAY);

Mat kernel = getStructuringElement(MORPH_RECT, Size(8,8));
dilate(gray, gray, kernel);                         //dilate to remove text and tables
threshold(gray, gray, 254, 255, THRESH_TOZERO);     //change white background to black
threshold(gray, gray, 0, 255, THRESH_BINARY_INV);   //invert binary image for easier processing

//try to fill images rectangles and remove noise
morphologyEx(gray, gray, MORPH_CLOSE, kernel);      
morphologyEx(gray, gray, MORPH_OPEN, kernel);

//find contours and approximate to squares
vector<vector<Point>> contours;
findContours(gray, contours, RETR_EXTERNAL, CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE);
vector<vector<Point>> squares(contours.size());
Mat mask(gray.rows, gray.cols, CV_8UC1, Scalar(0));
for (int j = 0; j < contours.size(); j++){
    if (contourArea(contours[j]) > 2000){       //optionally filter noise (too small contours)
        approxPolyDP(contours[j], squares[j], 50, true);
        drawContours(mask, squares, j, Scalar(255), -1);
    }
}

Mat final;
image.copyTo(final, mask);
imshow("Mask", mask);
imshow("Result", final);
waitKey();

So these are the results for the mask and the final matrices: image description

image description

Obviously, you can extract every independent image based on the found squares. Also, you'll probably need to tweak the different parameters to obtain the best results on your complete set of input images

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Asked: 2015-11-05 16:26:08 -0600

Seen: 2,618 times

Last updated: Nov 05 '15