OpenCV converting Canny edges to contours

image processingopencv

I have an OpenCV application fed from a webcam stream of an office interior (lot's of details) where I have to find an artificial marker. The marker is a black square on white background. I use Canny to find edges and cvFindContours for contouring, then approxPolyDP and co. for filtering and finding candidates, then use local histogram to filter further, bla bla bla…

This works more or less, but not exactly how I want. FindContours always returns a closed loop, even if Canny creates a non-closed line. I get a contour walking on both sides of the line forming a loop. For closed edges on the Canny image (my marker), I get 2 contours, one on the inside, and an other on the outside.
I have to problems with this operation:

I get 2 contours for each marker (not that serious)
the most trivial filtering is not usable (reject non-closed contours)

So my question: is it possible to get non-closed contours for non-closed Canny edges?
Or what is the standard way to solve the above 2 issues?

Canny is a very good tool, but I need a way convert the 2D b/w image, into something easily process-able. Something like connected components listing all pixels in walking order of the component. So I can filter for loops, and feed it into approxPolyDP.

Update: I missed some important detail: the marker can be in any orientation (it's not front facing the camera, no right angles), in fact what I'm doing is 3D orientation estimation, based on the 2D projection of the marker.

Best Answer

I found a clean and easy solution for the 2 issues in the question. The trick is enable 2 level hierarchy generation (in findCountours) and look for contours which have a parent. This will return the inner contour of closed Canny edges and nothing more. Non-closed edges are discarded automatically, and each marker will have a single contour.

vector<vector<Point> > contours;
vector<Vec4i> hierarchy;
findContours(CannyImage, contours, hierarchy, CV_RETR_CCOMP, CV_CHAIN_APPROX_NONE, Point(0,0) );
for (unsigned int i=0; i<contours.size(); i++)
    if (hierarchy[i][3] >= 0)   //has parent, inner (hole) contour of a closed edge (looks good)
        drawContours(contourImage, contours, i, Scalar(255, 0, 0), 1, 8);

It also works the other way around, that is: look for contours which have a child (hierarchy[i][2] >= 0), but in my case the parent check yields better results.

The original papers

Android – Find straight lines in contour openCV

For circles detection, use HoughCircles.

Then here you are just looking for simplified polygons (triangles and squares). Have you tried tweaking epsilon in approxPolyDP?

Here is an example snippet from the openCV squares.cpp sample code - see how approximation accuracy (epsilon, the third parameter of approxPolyDP), is set relative to the size of the contour.

C++ code, but the openCV interface should be the same, so I'm sure it's straightforward to adapt to your environment.

 // test each contour
  for( size_t i = 0; i < contours.size(); i++ )
      {
          // approximate contour with accuracy proportional
          // to the contour perimeter
      approxPolyDP(Mat(contours[i]), approx, 
                        arcLength(Mat(contours[i]), true)*0.02, true);

          // square contours should have 4 vertices after approximation
          // relatively large area (to filter out noisy contours)
          // and be convex.
          // Note: absolute value of an area is used because
          // area may be positive or negative - in accordance with the
          // contour orientation
      if( approx.size() == 4 &&
         fabs(contourArea(Mat(approx))) > 1000 &&
         isContourConvex(Mat(approx)) )
          {
          double maxCosine = 0;

          for( int j = 2; j < 5; j++ )
              {
                  // find the maximum cosine of the angle between joint edges
              double cosine = fabs(angle(approx[j%4], approx[j-2], approx[j-1]));
              maxCosine = MAX(maxCosine, cosine);
              }

              // if cosines of all angles are small
              // (all angles are ~90 degree) then write quandrange
              // vertices to resultant sequence

          if( maxCosine < 0.3 )
              squares.push_back(approx);
          }
      }

Best Answer

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Android – Find straight lines in contour openCV

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