TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF CRETE

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONIC AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

MACHINE VISION
Euripides G.M. Petrakis Michalis Zervakis

http://www.intelligence.tuc/~petrakis http://courses.ece.tuc.gr
Chania 2010
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Machine Vision
The goal of Machine Vision is to create a model of the real world from images
A machine vision system recovers useful information about a scene from its two dimensional projections The world is three dimensional Two dimensional digitized images

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Machine Vision (2)

Knowledge about the objects (regions) in a scene and projection geometry is required. The information which is recovered differs depending on the application
Satellite, medical images etc.

Processing takes place in stages:

Enhancement, segmentation, image analysis and matching (pattern recognition).
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Illumination

Image Acquisition

Machine Vision System

Scene

2D Digital Image

Image Description

Feedback The goal of a machine vision system is to compute a meaningful description of the scene (e.g., object)

Machine Vision Stages

Image Acquisition (by cameras, scanners etc) Image Processing Image Enhancement Image Restoration

Analog to digital conversion Remove noise/patterns, improve contrast Find regions (objects) in the image Take measurements of objects/relationships Match the above description with similar description of known objects (models)
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Image Segmentation

Image Analysis (Binary Image Processing) Model Matching Pattern Recognition E.G.M. Petrakis

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Image Processing
Image Processing

Input Image

Output Image

Image transformation image enhancement (filtering, edge detection, surface detection, computation of depth). Image restoration (remove point/pattern degradation: there exist a mathematical expression of the type of degradation like e.g. Added multiplicative noise, sin/cos pattern degradation etc).
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Image Segmentation
Image Segmentation

Input Image

Regions/Objects

Classify pixels into groups (regions/objects of interest) sharing common characteristics.

Intensity/Color, texture, motion etc.

Two types of techniques:

Region segmentation: find the pixels of a region. Edge segmentation: find the pixels of its outline contour.
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Image Analysis
Image Analysis

Input Image Segmented Image (regions, objects)

Measurements

Take useful measurements from pixels, regions, spatial relationships, motion etc.
Grey scale / color intensity values; Size, distance; Velocity;
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Pattern Recognition
Model Matching Pattern Recognition Image/regions Measurements, or Structural description

Class identifier

Classify an image (region) into one of a number of known classes

Statistical pattern recognition (the measurements form vectors which are classified into classes); Structural pattern recognition (decompose the image into primitive structures).
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Digital Image Representation

Image: 2D array of gray level or color values
Pixel: array element; Pixel value: arithmetic value of gray level or color intensity.

Gray level image: f = f(x,y) - 3D image f=f(x,y,z) Color image (multi-spectral) f = {Rred(x,y), Ggreen(x,y), Bblue(x,y)}
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What a computer sees is very different from what a human sees. A computer sees pixels (arithmetic values) while a human sees shapes, structures etc.

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Relationships to other fields

Image Processing (IP) Pattern Recognition (PR) Computer Graphics (CG) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Neural Networks (NN) Psychophysics
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E.G.M. Petrakis

Image Processing (IP)

IP transforms images to images
Image filtering, compression, restoration

IP is applied at the early stages of machine vision.

IP is usually used to enhance particular information and to suppress noise.

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Pattern Recognition (PR)

PR classifies numerical and symbolic data.
Statistical: classify feature vectors. Structural: represent the composition of an object in terms of primitives and parse this description.

PR is usually used to classify objects but object recognition in machine vision usually requires many other techniques.
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Statistical Pattern Recognition

Pattern: the description of an an object
Feature vector (size, roundness, color, texture)

Pattern class: set of patterns with similar characteristics. Take measurements from a population of patterns. Classification: Map each pattern to a class.
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Structure of PR Systems
input
Sensor Processing Measurements Classification class
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Example of Statistical PR
Two classes: I. W1 Basketball players II. W2 jockeys Description: X = (X1, X2) = (height, weight) X1 W2 .. .. . .. . . .. .

W1

.. . ..

D(X) = AX1 + BX2 + C = 0 Decision function X2

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Syntactic Pattern Recognition

The structure is important Identify primitives
E.g., Shape primitives

Break down an image (shape) into a sequence of such primitives. The way the primitives are related to each other to form a shape is unique.
Use a grammar/algorithm Parse the shape
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Primitives

G1,L(G1) : submedian Grammar G2,L(G2) : telocentric Grammar

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Each digit is represented by a waveform representing black/white, white/black transitions (scan the image from Left to right.

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Computer Graphics (CG)

Machine vision is the analysis of images while CG is the decomposition of images:
CG generates images from geometric primitives (lines, circles, surfaces). Machine vision is the inverse: estimate the geometric primitives from an image.

Visualization and virtual reality bring these two fields closer.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Machine vision is considered to be sub-field of AI. AI studies the computational aspects of intelligence. CV is used to analyze scenes and compute symbolic representations from them. AI: perception, cognition, action
Perception translates signals to symbols; Cognition manipulates symbols; Action translates symbols to signals that effect the world.
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Psychophysics
Psychophysics and cognitive science have studied human vision for a long time. Many techniques in machine vision are related to what is known about human vision.

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Neural Networks (NN)

NNs are being increasingly applied to solve many machine vision problems. NN techniques are usually applied to solve PR tasks.
Image recognition/classification.

They have also applied to segmentation and other machine vision tasks.
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Machine Vision Applications

Robotics Medicine Remote Sensing Cartography Meteorology Quality inspection Reconnaissance
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Robot Vision

Machine vision can make a robot manipulator much more versatile.

Allow it to deal with variations in parts position and orientation.
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Remote Sensing
Take images from high altitudes (from aircrafts, satellites). Find ships in the aerial image of the dock.
Find if new ships have arrived. What kind of ships?

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Remote Sensing (2)

Analyze the image
Generate a description Match this descriptions with the descriptions of empty docs

There are four ships

Marked by +

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Medical Applications
Assist a physician to reach a diagnosis. Construct 2D, 3D anatomy models of the human body.
CG geometric models.

Analyze the image to extract useful features.

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Machine Vision Systems

There is no universal machine vision system
One system for each application

Assumptions:
Good lighting; Low noise; 2D images

Passive - Active environment

Changes in the environment call for different actions (e.g., turn left, push the break etc).
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Vision by Man and Machine

What is the mechanism of human vision?
Can a machine do the same thing? There are many studies; Most are empirical.

Humans and machines have different

Software Hardware

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Human Hardware
Photoreceptors take measurements of light signals.
About 106 Photoreceptors.

Retinal ganglion cells transmit electric and chemical signals to the brain
Complex 3D interconnections; What the neurons do? In what sequence? Algorithms?

Heavy Parallelism.
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Machine Vision Hardware

PCs, workstations etc. Signals: 2D image arrays gray level/color values. Modules: low level processing, shape from texture, motion, contours etc. Simple interconnections. No parallelism.

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Course Outline
Introduction to machine vision, applications, Image formation, color, reflectance, depth, stereopsis. Basic image processing techniques (filtering, digitization, restoration), Fourier transform. Binary image processing and analysis, Distance transform, morphological operators.

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Course Outline (2)

Image segmentation (region segmentation, edge segmentation). Edge detection, edge enhancement and linking. Thresholding, region growing, region merging/splitting. Relaxation labeling, Hough transform. Image analysis, shape analysis. Polygonal approximation, splines, skeletons. Shape features, multi-resolution representations.
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Course Outline (3)

Image representation, image - shape recognition and classification. Attributed relational graphs, semantic nets. Image - shape matching (Fourier descriptors, moments, matching in scale space). Texture representation and recognition, statistical and structural methods. Motion, motion detection, optical flow. Video
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Bibliography
Machine Vision, Ramesh Jain, Rangachar Kasturi, Brian G. Schunck, Mc Graw-Hill, 1995 (highly recommended!).

"Image Processing, Analysis and Machine Vision", Milan Sonka, Vaclav Hlavac, Roger Boyle, PWS Publishing, Second Edition.
"Machine Vision, Theory, Algorithms, Practicalities'', E. R. Davies, Academic Press, 1997.
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 "Practical Computer Vision Using C'', J. R. Parker, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1994. Selected articles from the literature. Lecture notes (http://www.intelligence.tuc/~petrakis) Webcourses (http://courses.ece.tuc.gr)

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Grading Scheme
Final Exam (F): 40%, min 5 Assignments (): 40% Two assignments
Obligatory

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