## Thursday, December 29, 2011

Below are the first results of the adaptive skin classifier I implemented.
There is no prior knowledge, the skin histogram model is learned from the HAAR detector regions and some morphological filtering.

There is an awful lot of parameters to tweak, it's getting ridiculous.
Currently I'm trying to incorporate the adaptive mask to the particle filter but there are some technical issues.
Anyway, the tracking is being handled by the mean shift tracker which sucks.

### Mixing Histograms

In the last few days I implemented an adaptive skin classifier in make it easier for the tracking algorithms to find the objects. Emgu already has an adaptive skin classifier but you cannot change any parameters and the results are horrible.

Anyway, mixing two histograms in Emgu is not as straightforward as one might think.
The internal representation of the histograms is the N-th dimensional matrix class , MatND and the OpenCV does not overload any operators.

Thankfully there is a function in the cvInvoke that does the job.
I wasted about half an hour trying to use the cvAdd function but it crashed the whole thing about a dozen times, so I ended up using the cvAddWeighted function.

Below is the code snippet for histogram mixing :

        /// <summary>
/// Mixes two histograms , new histogram is _mixCoeff * _histTarget + (1 - _mixCoeff) * _histMix
/// Old target histogram is destroyed
/// </summary>
/// <param name="_histTarget">Target histogram</param>
/// <param name="_hist1">Histogram 1</param>
/// <param name="_hist2">Histogram 2</param>
/// <param name="_mixCoeff">Mixing Coefficient</param>
public static void MixHistograms(
DenseHistogram _histTarget,
DenseHistogram _hist1,
DenseHistogram _hist2,
float _mixCoeff)
{
_hist1.MatND.Ptr,
_mixCoeff,
_hist2.MatND.Ptr,
1.0d - _mixCoeff,
0,
_histTarget.MatND.Ptr);
}


PS. On a following post I will post the adaptive skin classifier.

## Monday, December 12, 2011

### Image Segmentation

In computer vision, segmentation refers to the process of partitioning a digital image into multiple segments. The goal of segmentation is to simplify and/or change the representation of an image into something that is more meaningful and easier to analyze.

I have a dataset of hands against a background. As you can see the background is not uniformly lit.

In addition to that the hand's position ,scale and rotation is not static.
I don't have the ground truth of the hand and I don't want to waste my twenties marking it myself.
It is fairly obvious that thresholding simply doesn't cut it and given that I don't have any skin information to begin with what can I do?

Well , the only thing you can do is improvise.

My first thought was to use K-Means to try to split the image into two parts : a background class containing the backdrop and a foreground class containing the hand pixels.

I tested that a bit and found that it worked pretty well. So I decided to upgrade it and use Expectation Maximization using Gaussian Mixtures.
A subproblem is given the two classes is discriminating between the skin and background classes. After the mask is computer it is advisable to do some post-processing to remove some rogue pixels.

Below I include the code to do all the above :

%------------------------------------------------------------------------
% gather features
[rows cols colors] = size(imgDouble);
[X,Y] = meshgrid(0 :1/(rows-1) : 1,0 :1/(cols-1) :1);
X = reshape(X,rows*cols,1);
Y = reshape(Y,rows*cols,1);
imgFeatures = [X Y];

for i = 1 : colors
imgFeatures = [imgFeatures reshape(imgDouble(:,:,i),rows*cols,1)];
end
%------------------------------------------------------------------------
% use EM with gaussian mixture
objGM = gmdistribution.fit(imgFeatures,noClasses,'Replicates',10);
% find which of the classes is the hand
Sigma = zeros(noClasses,1);
for i = 1 : noClasses
Sigma(i) = sum(sum(objGM.Sigma(:,:,i)));
end
[C,I] = max(Sigma);
skinClass = I(1);
% use gaussian mixtures to classify pixel features
[IDX,nlogl,P] = cluster(objGM,imgFeatures);
% fill holes to create a mask
IDXimg = reshape(IDX,rows,cols);
IDXimg = IDXimg == skinClass;
IDXimg = bwmorph(IDXimg,'erode',1);
IDXimg = bwareaopen(IDXimg, 100 / scale);
imgMasked(repmat(IDXimg == 0,[1 1 colors])) = 0;
%------------------------------------------------------------------------


I used a bit of active contours cleaning that I don't include. Below I include some of the resulting images which are very satisfying and can be used to bootstrap any system for even better results :