Estimate white background

podlipensky
6 ●1 ●2 ●4

Hi,

I have image with white uneven background (due to lighting). I'm trying to estimate background color and transform image into image with true white background. For this I estimated white color for each 15x15 pixels block based on its luminosity. So I've got the following map (on the right): image description

Now I want to interpolate color so it will be more smooth transition from 15x15 block to neighboring block, plus I want it to eliminate outliers (pink dots on left hand side). Could anyone suggest good technique/algorithm for this? (Ideally within OpenCV library, but not necessary)

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Have a look here

LBerger (Feb 10 '16)edit

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answered Feb 11 '16

StevenPuttemans

20029 ●16 ●82 ●207 http://stevenputtemans...

Simplest solution, convert to grayscale and do a OTSU thresholding, which will be between the letters and the background. Then simply replace the background with plain white color!

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OTSU thresholding won't work perfectly with illumination, i.e. if some drawing is light on a photo due to illumination, it will be filtered out by OTSU thresholding since it will be done in grayscale mode. Any other ideas?

podlipensky (Feb 21 '16)edit

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answered Feb 10 '16

jeanpat
6 ●3

updated Feb 10 '16

What about a top-hat filtering? From an ipython console:

kernel18 = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE,(18,18))
filtered = cv2.morphologyEx(image, cv2.MORPH_TOPHAT, kernel18)

The image may has to be converted into a greyscaled image.

It's possible to get something like this image with a smaller kernel (clik on the link)

http://postimg.org/image/k7n2fjrfd/

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If I convert image to grayscale, I'll loose an ability to detect outliers, but let me take a closer look to this method...

podlipensky (Feb 10 '16)edit

From your image:

board = mh.imread('/home/jeanpat/Images/paperboard.jpg',-1)
cut = board[40:,10:1000]
cut = cut.max()-cut
print cut.shape, cut.max()
kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE,(15,15))
cut_f = cv2.morphologyEx(cut,cv2.MORPH_TOPHAT, kernel)

(mh is a shortcut for mahotas, but it should possible to load the image with cv2 itself) link text

jeanpat (Feb 10 '16)edit

@jeanpat, unfortunately the operation above makes resulting image black. I believe this is due to erosion. But overall approach might work just fine if I can use reverse-erosion... Playing with it.

podlipensky (Feb 10 '16)edit

A top hat with a 15x15 structuring element succeeds in extracting the characters (see the link)

jeanpat (Feb 10 '16)edit

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Estimate white background

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