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Basic Feature Detection
The human brain does a lot of pattern recognition to make sense of raw
visual inputs.
o After the eye focuses on an object, the brain identifies the
characteristics of the object —such as its shape, color, or texture— and
then compares these to the characteristics of familiar objects to match
and recognize the object.
o In computer vision, that process of deciding what to focus on is called
feature detection.
o A feature can be formally defined as ā€œone or more measurements of
some quantifiable property of an object, computed so that it quantifies
some significant characteristics of the objectā€ (Kenneth R. Castleman,
Digital Image Processing, Prentice Hall, 1996).
o Easier way to think of it: a feature is an ā€œinterestingā€ part of an image.
Good Vision System Characteristics
o A good vision system should not waste time—or processing
power—analyzing the unimportant or uninteresting parts
of an image, so feature detection helps determine which
pixels to focus on.
o We will focus on the most basic types of features: blobs,
lines, circles, and corners.
o If the detection is robust, a feature is something that could
be reliably detected across multiple images.
Detection criteria
o How we describe the feature can also determine the
situations in which we can detect the feature.
o Our detection criteria for the feature determines whether
we can:
• Find the features in different locations of the picture
(position invariant)
• Find the feature if it’s large or small, near or far (scale
invariant)
• Find the feature if it’s rotated at different orientations
(rotation invariant)
Blobs
Blobs are objects or connected components, regions
of similar pixels in an image. The examples are as
follows:
• A group of brownish pixels together, which
might represent food in a pet food detector.
• A group of shiny metal looking pixels, which
on a door detector would represent the door
knob.
• A group of matte white pixels, which on a
medicine bottle detector could represent the
cap.
o Blobs are valuable in machine vision because
many things can be described as an area of a
certain color or shade in contrast to a background.
Finding Blobs
Morphological operators such has thresholding can be used
to find objects that are lightly colored in an image. If no
parameters are specified, the function tries to automatically
detect what is bright and what is dark.
Blob Measurements
After a blob is identified we can measure a lot of different
things:
o Area
o Width and height
o Find the centroid
o Count the number of blobs
o Look at the color of blobs
o look at its angle to see its rotation
o find how close it is to a circle, square, or rectangle —or
o compare its shape to another blob
Blob Detection And Measurement
1. Blobs are most easily detected on a binarized image.
2. Returns a Feature Set:
• List of features about the blobs found
• Has a set of defined methods that are useful when
handling features
3. It draws each feature in the Feature Set on top of the
original image and then displays the results.
After the blob is found, several other functions provide
basic information about the feature, such as its size,
location, and orientation.
Vision-Based Apps
o App 3 : Blob Detection
o App4 : Measuring Blobs
If you would like to Learn More
on Image Processing Course
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Course Description
Learn the basic concepts, tools, and functions that you will need to build
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• Together we will build a strong foundation in Image Processing with
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• LabVIEW Vision Development Toolkit Download and Installation
• Basic Feature Detection
• Circle, Color and Edge Detection Algorithms
• Advance Feature Detection - Pattern Matching, Object Tracking, OCR,
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Starting with the installation of the LabVIEW Vision
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main and fundamental Image Processing tools used in industry
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create the following Apps:
• App 1 - Counting M&Ms in an Image,
• App 2 - Color Segmentation and Tracking,
• App 3 - Coin Blob detection
• App 4 - Blob Range Estimation
• App 5 - Lane Detection and Ruler Width Measurement
• App 6 - Pattern or Template Matching to detect Complex
Objects
• App 7 - Object Tracking
• App 8 - Bar code Recognition
• App 9 - Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
With these basic and advanced algorithms mastered, the
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