I've read many C# tutorials on using lockbits to manipulate images, but I just don't know how to apply this info into PowerShell.
This is the problem:
$image1's height is 2950 pixels. $image2's height is 50 px taller, 3000 pixels. I need to fit $image2 into $image1 and I can skip $image2's first 49 px lines. So in pseudocode:
For(y=0... For(x=0.... { image1(x,y) = image2(x,y+50) } ....))
The PowerShell script below works, but does not work very fast:
$rect = new-object Drawing.Rectangle 0, 0, $image1.width, $image1.height
$image1drawing.drawimage($image2,
$rect,
0, 50, $image2.width, ($image2.height - 50),
$graphicalUnit)
The pages I've found, such as this (Not able to successfully use lockbits) or this (https://web.archive.org/web/20121203144033/http://www.bobpowell.net/lockingbits.htm) are in "plain English" but how to convert this concept into PowerShell?
You are using the correct approach. Using DrawImage will be faster that copying the pixels one by one.
Some suggestions to make it faster:
Try using Image.Clone to copy a rectangle from the original image, this will result in the smallest number of objects you need to create.
Make sure you use the same PixelFormat as the original image (faster copying). There is a PixelFormat attribute in Image.
Most important: accessing Width and Height takes a long time so save them to a local variable for reuse. If you know them before hand that's a good way to speed-up things.
Don't expect miracles at a width to height ratio of 4:3 each image is 3932 * 2950 * 3(assuming 24 bit RGB) = 33Mb per image. That's a lot of data, you may easily be be trying to copy a few gigs depending on how many images you have.
You are better off writing a simple cmdlet and using it in your PowerShell script.
BTW in case you are still interested:
Using lockbits in C# (as per your examples) relies on unsafe context and using pointers. I don't believe PowerShell has access to unsafe context.
You can manipulate unmanaged data without using an unsafe context by using the Marshall class; specifically the Read and Write methods (and you might be able to speed things up with the Copy method at expense of memory).
PowerShell was not meant as a replacement for .Net generic languages, that's what CmdLets are for.
Hi there I am looking to create a image dynamically from an array[500][500] (500x500pixel)
Each array item has the pixel color data,
Does anyone know which .NET library/interface would be best for this? Could point me in right direction? I need to create/save the file.
Also, The image is a composite of the data from many images, I am wondering if it is possible to use various formats, or if I need to first convert the small images into one format,
Also which image format is best to use (the most compatible?) JPG/PNG24? (for web)
Thanks for your input!
if you can use unsafe code in your website (in other words, your code runs under full trust), just use the Bitmap class, and use the LockBits method, then you can use pointers just like in C++ to access the pixels (tip: create a Pixel struct to hold RGB values). You will see GetPixel and SetPixel methods, DO NOT EVER use them. The performance is terrible, more than 100 times slower than using pointers. Just go with BitmapData.Scan0.ToPointer() and then iterate with for.
You could use the System.Drawing.Bitmap class.
If you are able to use unsafe code, construct the bitmap using pointers and BitmapData rather than SetPixel
var bitmap = new Bitmap(500, 500);
// Update the pixels with values in you array...
bitmap.Save("myfilename.jpg", ImageFormat.Jpeg);
The format depends on what you need (for example png can support transaprency, jpg does not).
You could start wich System.Drawing.Bitmap .
Problem
Problem shaping
Image sequence position and size are fixed and known beforehand (it's not scaled). It will be quite short, maximum of 20 frames and in a closed loop. I want to verify (event driven by button click), that I have seen it before.
Lets say I have some image sequence, like:
http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/5440/60372aeba8595eda.gif
If seen, I want to see the ID associated with it, if not - it will be analyzed and added as new instance of image sequence, that has been seen. I have though about this quite a while, and I admit, this might be a hard problem. I seem to be having hard time of putting this all together, can someone assist (in C#)?
Limitations and uses
I am not trying to recreate copyright detection system, like content id system Youtube has implemented (Margaret Gould Stewart at TED ( link )). The image sequence can be thought about like a (.gif) file, but it is not and there is no direct way to get binary. Similar method could be used, to avoid duplicates in "image sharing database", but it is not what I am trying to do.
My effort
Gaussian blur
Mathematica function to generate Gaussian blur kernels:
getKernel[L_] := Transpose[{L}].{L}/(Total[Total[Transpose[{L}].{L}]])
getVKernel[L_] := L/Total[L]
Turns out, that it is much more efficient to use 2 passes of vector kernel, then matrix kernel. Thy are based on Pascal triangle uneven rows:
{1d/4, 1d/2, 1d/4}
{1d/16, 1d/4, 3d/8, 1d/4, 1d/16}
{1d/64, 3d/32, 15d/64, 5d/16, 15d/64, 3d/32, 1d/64}
Data input, hashing, grayscaleing and lightboxing
Example of source bits, that might be useful:
Lightbox around the known rectangle: FrameX
Using MD5CryptoServiceProvider to get md5 hash of the content inside known rectangle atm.
Using ColorMatrix to grayscale image
Source example
Source example (GUI; code):
Get current content inside defined rectangle.
private Bitmap getContentBitmap() {
Rectangle r = f.r;
Bitmap hc = new Bitmap(r.Width, r.Height);
using (Graphics gf = Graphics.FromImage(hc)) {
gf.CopyFromScreen(r.Left, r.Top, 0, 0, //
new Size(r.Width, r.Height), CopyPixelOperation.SourceCopy);
}
return hc;
}
Get md5 hash of bitmap.
private byte[] getBitmapHash(Bitmap hc) {
return md5.ComputeHash(c.ConvertTo(hc, typeof(byte[])) as byte[]);
}
Get grayscale of the image.
public static Bitmap getGrayscale(Bitmap hc){
Bitmap result = new Bitmap(hc.Width, hc.Height);
ColorMatrix colorMatrix = new ColorMatrix(new float[][]{
new float[]{0.5f,0.5f,0.5f,0,0}, new float[]{0.5f,0.5f,0.5f,0,0},
new float[]{0.5f,0.5f,0.5f,0,0}, new float[]{0,0,0,1,0,0},
new float[]{0,0,0,0,1,0}, new float[]{0,0,0,0,0,1}});
using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(result)) {
ImageAttributes attributes = new ImageAttributes();
attributes.SetColorMatrix(colorMatrix);
g.DrawImage(hc, new Rectangle(0, 0, hc.Width, hc.Height),
0, 0, hc.Width, hc.Height, GraphicsUnit.Pixel, attributes);
}
return result;
}
I think you have a few issues with this:
Not all image sequences [videos] are equal [but many are similar]
Where is your data coming from?
How will you repesent the data related to your viewings?
Size of the data
Issue #1:
Many images can differ slightly by compression, water marking, missing frames, and adding clips. I would suggest sampling the video. For example you may want to consider sub-sampling small sections of the images in the video. Additionally, to avoid noisy images and issues with lossely compression algorithms. You may want to consider grayscaling the frames sampled, and doing a gaussian blur. [Guassian because its "more natural" (short answer)] Once you have enough sub samples to where you have a good confidence of similarity to the video then store it in a database. With the samples you can hash them, or store them to do a % similarity later.
Issue #2
Your datasource is going to influence the tool kits, and libraries that you use.
I would suggest keeping this simple [keep it with gifs and create a custom viewer, dont' try to write a browser plugin while developing your logic]
Issue #3
Using something like Postgres [if there are a lot of large sized objects] or SQLLite is highly suggested for indexing, storing, and recalling past meta data.
Issue #4
The size of the data will have a huge determination on recall, sampling, querying the database, etc.
Overall advice: Don't bite off more than you can handle at this stage. Start small and then grow.
Also take a look at Computer Vision algorithms for more help on the object representation/recall.
The question itself is sure very interesting and challenging, however there are many practical issues as stated by #monksy.
The opportunist pragmatic in me would take a step back, look at the big picture and see if there is another way to solve the problem. For example, if you are building some kind of "image sharing community" and want to avoid duplicates in the database, you could do a simple md5 on the file (animated gifs on the web are usually always the same, it's rare that people modify them).
Another example: if you are analyzing scientific samples (like meteo sequences) it may be easier to directly embed some kind of hash in every file when generating them.
This depends on wether you only want to know wether you've seen an absolutely identical movie again, or you also want to identify movies that are very similar but have been changed a bit (made lighter, have a watermark added, compression changed, etc.)
In the first case, just take any type of hash of the file and use that (because the file will be identical on the binary level.
In the second case (which I think is what you want) you have an interesting image processing problem on your hands. You could find yourself at the front-lines of image processing science with this if you'd want. If that is the case I suggest you start reading about SURF and OpenCV, and continue on from that.
If you want to match very similar, but not identical videos, and don't want to go the ultra-robus scientific route then I'd suggest the following process:
Do the gaussian blur you already do.
Divide each image into a few equally sized rectangles (you'd have to test for the best number, but I'd suggest you start with 9.
For each rectangle in each frame compute the full-colour histogram, then find the most occurring colour in that rectangle. This gives you 9*20 = 180 numbers. This is the "fingerprint" of this movie.
Find the most similar fingerprint in your database, if it is similar enough you already know about it, otherwise you don't.
Step 4 is a bit vague because I'm not really into this field. You are currently using an MD5 hash as a sort of fingerprint, but this is unsuitable in this case because slight differences in the input of a good cryptographic hashing function produce very large differences in the hash. This will mean that two very similar frames will have a totally different MD5 hash, so from the hash you'd never know they were similar.
As long as speed of database lookups is not an issue I'd just go for the sum of square differences as a measure of fingerprint similarity, and set a threshold on that to identify equal movies. However, this is not very fast for huge datasets, and in those cases you'd probably need to transform your fingerprint to something that will allow you to find similar fingerprints faster. One thing you could do here is start by selecting all known movies with very similar average colour for the entire video, then from that select the movies that have very similar average colour in each frame, and in the ones that remain at that point do the full rectangle-by-rectangle fingerprint match. But I'm sure there are even faster options for matching 180 numbers.
Perhaps you can find a way to get a binary copy of the image data of each frame in a variable. Hash that data (md5?) and store each of the hashes. Then you can see if you've ever seen that hash before. If you haven't, it's a new frame.
I'm having an issue with converting a BitmapImage (WPF) to grayscale, whilst keeping the alpha channel. The source image is a PNG.
The MSDN article here works fine, but it removes the alpha channel.
Is there any quick and effective way of converting a BitmapImage to a grayscale?
You should have a look at image transformation using matrices.
In particular, this article describes how to convert a bitmap to grayscale using a ColorMatrix. (It is written in VB.NET, but it should be easy enough to translate to C#).
I haven't tested if it works with the alpha channel, but I'd say it's worth a try, and it definitely is a quick and effective way of modifying bitmaps.
It really depends upon what your source PixelFormat is. Assuming your source is PixelFormats.Bgra32 and that you want to go to grayscale, you might consider using a target pixel format of PixelFormats.Gray16. However, Gray16 doesn't support alpha. It just has 65,535 graduations between black and white, inclusive.
You have a few options. One is to stay with Bgra32 and just set the blue, green and red channels to the same value. That way you can keep the alpha channel. This may be wasteful if you don't require an 8-bit alpha channel (for differing levels of alpha per pixel).
Another option is to use an indexed pixel format such as PixelFormats.Indexed8 and create a palette that contains the gray colours you need and alpha values. If you don't need to blend alpha, you could make the palette colour at position zero be completely transparent (an alpha of zero) and then progress solid black in index 1 through to white in 255.
if relying on API calls fails. You can always try the 'do it yourself' approach: Just get access to the RGBA bytes of the picture, and for every RGBA replace it with MMMA, where M = (R+G+B)/3;
If you want it more perfect, you should add weights to the contribution of the RGB components. I believe your eye is more receptive for green, and as such that value should weigh more.
While not exactly quick and easy, a ShaderEffect would do the job and perform quite well. I've done it myself, and it works great. This article references how to do it and has source associated. I've not used his source, so I can't vouch for it. If you run into problems, ask, and I may be able to post some of my code.
Not every day you get to use HLSL in your LOB app. :)
I need to convert a RGB (jpg) grayscale CMYK using only to black channel (K).
I'm trying to do this with imageglue, but the result is not what i'm looking for since it converts the grays using the C,M and Y channel and leaves the black channel to 0%.
What I need is if anyone has experience in using any other library/api in .net that could work?
I would start by looking at the ColorConvertedBitmap class in WPF. Here is a link to the docs and a basic example:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.imaging.colorconvertedbitmap(VS.85).aspx
Have you triedAForge.Net?
There is also ImageMagick, a c++ framework for image processing, with a .net wrapper (google for MagickNet)
Her is RGB to/from CMYK question which is related this one:
How is 1-bit bitmap data converted to 8bit (24bpp)?
I found The bitmap transform classes useful when trying to do some image format conversions but ... CYMK is one of the most complicated conversions you can tackle because there is more than one way to represent some colours. In particular equal CYM percentages give you shades of grey which are equivalent to the same percentage of K. Printers often use undercolour removal/transformation which normalises CYMK so that the a large common percentage is taken from CYM and transfered to the K. This is suppose to give purer blacks and grey tones. So even if you have a greyscale image represented using nothing but CYM with a zero black channel it could still print using nothing but K when you get it to a printer using undercolour removal.