Find transparent area in an image - c#

I'm writing a CSS sprite sheet generator. I know there are several decent ones out there, but this is more a personal interest project than anything. I've got a decent algorithm now, but I'm ending up with a lot of leftover whitespace due to the way I'm calculating the position for the next image to pack. So my thought was this:
Given images A and B in C#, how could I find the top-left-most transparent area in image A that would accomodate the area of image B? In other words, assuming image B is a 10x10 image, how could I find the first 10x10 transparent area in image A (assuming there is one)?

Related

How to split an image based on transparent areas

I have searched the internet thoroughly but couldn't find a solution
Here what i want
This is my image
This is how it looks with 0 transparency when i have selected
So programmatically i want to split image into 6 pieces. Each one containing one of the egg with 0 transparent area left
How can i do that?
My preferred solutions based on c# or photoshop script but i am open to all solutions
An example output
To solve this problem for any image size, egg size, orientation, position, count I suggest to use the following approach:
Load the image file.
Extract the alpha channel (this contains the transparency information)
find the egg blobs (blob search/analysis, region labelling, connected components, countless names for this method)
get the bounding boxes of those blobs
crop the sub images using those bounding boxes
This can be achieved with most image processing librarys. If you prefer C#, give EmguCV a try. Or use websearch to find others.
http://www.emgu.com/wiki/files/3.1.0/document/html/e13fa7a9-5eee-b46c-4b65-ff3e7e427719.htm

Find image within image (object detection)

I do have different images which all have some kind of border around the "real" image. What I would like to achieve is to find the "real" image (size and location in pixels).
For me the challenge is that the border is not always black (can be any kind of black or grey with a lot of noise) and the "real" image (water with shark in this example) can have any combination of color, saturation, ...
Now in general I'm aware of algorithms like Canny, Blob detection, hough lines, ..., but I have just started using them. So far I managed to find the border for a specific image, but as soon as I try to apply the same algorithms and parameters to the next image it doesn't work. My current approach looks like this (pseudo code):
convert to gray CvInvoke.CvtColor(_processedImage, tempMat, CvEnum.ColorConversion.Rgb2Gray)
downsample with CvInvoke.PyrDown(srcImage, targetImage) and CvInvoke.PyrUp(srcImage, targetImage)
blur image with CvInvoke.GaussianBlur(_processedImage, bluredImage, New Drawing.Size(5, 5), 0)
Binarize with CvInvoke.Threshold(_processedImage, blackWhiteImage, _parameters.BinarizeThreshold, 255, CvEnum.ThresholdType.Binary)
Detect Edges with CvInvoke.Canny(_processedImage, imgEdges, 60, 100)
Find Contours with CvInvoke.FindContours(_processedImage, contours, Nothing, CvEnum.RetrType.External, CvEnum.ChainApproxMethod.ChainApproxSimple)
Assume that largest contour is the real image
I already tried different approaches based on for example:
Thresholding saturation channel and bounding box
Thresholding, canny edge and finding contours
Any hint especially on how to find proper parameters (that apply for all images) for algorithms like (adaptive) threshold and canny as well as ideas for improving the processing pipeline would be highly appreciated.
you can try to subtract black image from this image , and you will get the inside image , way to do this:
Use image subtraction to compare images in C# ,
If the border was uniform, this would be easy. Use cv::reduce to find MIN and MAX of each row and column; then count the top,left,bottom,right rows/columns whose MIN and MAX are equal (or very close) to the pixel value in a nearby corner. For sanity, maybe check the border colour is the same on all sides.
In your example the border contains faint red stuff, but a row/column approach might still be a useful way to simplify the problem. Maybe, as Nofar suggests, take an absolute difference with what you think is the background colour; square it, convert to grey, then reduce to Sums of rows and columns. You still need to find edges, but have reduced the data from two dimensions to one.
If there's a large border and lots of noise, maybe iterate: in the second pass, exclude the rows you think comprise the border, from statistics on columns (and vice versa).
EDIT: The above only works for an upright rectangle! If it could be rotated then the row/column projection method won't work. In that case I might go for sum-of-squared differences as above (don't start by converting to grey as it could throw away information), followed by blurring or some morphology, edge detection then some kind of Hough transform to find straight edges.

Cropping a Bitmap to an Area of Interest

Similar to my previous question which I as yet have not solved (Comparing Frames of a live Feed) I have another issue.
Scenario
I have an image taken by a camera that contains a rectangle in it. I need to crop the image to only show the rectangle plus a small margin.
My Efforts
I have accomplished this by iterating through the pixels using LockBits and attempting to find potential edges but these seems terribly slow and inefficient
My Thoughts
I was thinking I could take an empty image as a baseline and then remove the differences between the two, however I cannot be sure that the lighting will be exactly the same and that potential contaminants such as an accidental fly getting into the image will not be present which could muck up this process.
Is there any easier way? The rectangle should (usually) be in the bottom left corner, but not always (long story) but this cant be relied upon.
My Environment
Visual Studio 2012 (2010 if neccessary is available)
Ueye camera
C#
The images are of type System.Drawing.Bitmap
The rectangle will often be something like a credit card or an ID card or anything of a similar size and shape
The empty image (background) looks like this:
Using EmguCV you can detect shapes such as a rectangle. Click here for the emgu code. Once you have detected the rectangle it is fairly easy to crop it out using a new Bitmap with the size of the rectangle.
The sample demonstrates how to crop the image from specific Picturebox control into destination Picturebox control using mouse selection or specified coordinates.
1.How to use mouse to select an area (rectangle) in a Picturebox control.
2.How to crop the image by the rectangle.
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/CSWinFormCropImage-d4beb1fa

How can I set an image to have a transparent background in C# without using Bitmap.MakeTransparent()?

I want to set an image to have a transparent background, but I do not want to replace all pixels of a specific colour with transparency.
To be more specific, the image is a thumbnail image for a folder, obtained via IShellItemImageFactory.GetImage. This gives me a Bitmap, as displayed in Windows Explorer thumbnail view, but the background is solid white.
I can use Bitmap.MakeTransparent on it, and that will work in most cases, but in any cases where the thumbnail image contains white itself (for example, a folder that contains images, which include white colours).
Incidently, this is the first time in over 10 years as a developer that, after googling my question, I have not found an answer anywhere, and I've actually had to ask it myself. (I think that means I just levelled up! Yippee, I am now a level 2 developer...)
Use flood-fill algorithm to fill pixels of the same color from the OUTSIDE as you need it. It is something similar to magic wand in photoshop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_fill
What I would do is flood-fill with some obscure color (Magenta always does it for me), then replace that color with transparent (I don't know if flood filling with transparent pixels is feasible).
So what you're getting from IShellItemImageFactory.GetImage is a composite image that contains the original image on a white background? I suspect the white background is there if the image doesn't have the same aspect ratio as the thumbnail size. For example, if you ask for a 96x96 thumbnail of a 640x480 image, there's going to be some white space at top and bottom.
If that's the case, you have a problem. You can't differentiate between white pixels that are contained in the image, and white pixels that are added by GetImage.
There are a few things you could do. You could load the image and resize it yourself. That's probably the easiest. You'd want to maintain your own thumbnail cache then.
Or you could examine the image returned by GetImage to look for white space on the sides. Basically, if every pixel on a row (or column) is white, then make that row (or column) transparent. It's a little more complicated than that (the NBA logo, for example). But that's essentially what you'd want to do.

Image Co-Ordinate System Design

I'm diving into something without sufficient background, but I feel like there may be simple solutions that don't require me to have in depth knowledge of the topic.
What I am trying to do is have an image co-ordinate system. Basically the user will supply an image, like a house plan. They can then click on points in the image and create markers (like google maps). The next time they retrieve the map, all the markers they added before are there and they can add new ones.
I need to identify the points these markers are located on so I can store that information. I also need to be able to create a layer on the image that contains the markers and renders them in the exact locations they were placed.
I imagine the easiest way to do this is to use pixel co-ordinates...the rub here is that the image won't be a fixed size since there is a web application and an IPad application, so the co-ordinate system needs to work as long as the image is in the same size ratio.
The server size is .NET and as mentioned there is an IPad app, so the solution needs to be viable given that tech stack.
Any ideas?
Instead of using pixel coordinates in absolute terms, you can use the 0 to 1 range. The top left corner is (0,0), bottom right is (1,1) and the center of the image is (0.5,0.5). This way not matter what image size (or zoom level) you have, the markers will always be in the same place.
My suggestion is don't try to figure out the correlation between the actual image and the coordinates. The only thing I would do is use the resolution of the image, aka 800x600 and use that for your grid. Then overlay your markers using that grid on the image. The points you'd remember would just be X and Y values and maybe a tag name/id.

Categories