loveandkindness's profile - activity

I just found an ImageJ plugin (http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/plugins/time-series.html) that does this entire process, and outputs the results into a text file. I'm still very curious how others would handle this job, since the first method I come across can't always be the best.

Imagine that we have a image sequence of some Christmas tree lights stretched out on the ground. The lights are blinking away. We're not interested in colors, only brightness and periods.

Assuming that the lights don't move throughout the video, this is how I would tackle the problem:

1. I would begin by using region of interest manager in ImageJ to quickly bound each light with a rectangle, then export the xy coordinates into a file.
2. Next, load the xy coordinates into a Python script. Each light is to be cropped out of the large image and stored in a list of smaller images.
3. On each image, I would then perform a gray scale conversion, Gaussian Blur, and Otsu's Binary Thresholding.
4. Lastly, I would sum over the binary images to yield an integer, which should give a relative brightness. Store and loop for each image in the sequence, and for each light in each image.

Thank you very much for any advise or critique!

edit: Also, imagine that someone will be randomly shining a flashlight at different lights in the video. Any ideas on reducing the damage from this, if possible, would be wonderful!

These are ecoli cells under 40x magnification. The images I will be dealing with will be at 10x (making them look like points).

http://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/courses/aph162/2006/webpages/SizeAndRate/Oren-Nick/E._coli_40X.jpg

I have a large sequence of images with dots 2-7 pixels in size moving around. The images are blurry and contain numerous unwanted blips, but the only things that are persistent and moving are the points.

I'd like to subtract everything from the image sequence except those points.

I'm new to image processing, and am not sure where my first step should be. I'm thinking equalizeHist, adaptiveThresholding, and BackgroundSubtractorMOG are a good place to start. Is this a good idea?

Is there a more formal method for this kind of thing? I've read through more than a few tutorials now, but they have all been scattered knowledge.

Thank you very much for any advise you can offer!

(I'm most comfortable with Python.)