Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
• Representation
– The segmentation techniques yield data in the form
of pixels along a boundary or pixels contained in a
region.
– It is standard practice to use schemes that compact
the segmented data into representations that
facilitate the computation of descriptors.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
• Boundary Following:
– We assume
• (1) that we are working with binary images in which
object and background points are labeled 1 and 0,
respectively
• (2) the images are padded with a border of 0s to
eliminate the possibility of an object merging with the
image border.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
Given a binary region R or its boundary, an algorithm for
following the border of R, or the given boundary,
consists of the following steps:
1. Let the starting point, b0, be the uppermost, leftmost
point in the image that is labeled 1. Denote by c0 the
west neighbor of b0. Clearley, c0 always is a background
point. Examine the 8-neighbors of b0, starting at c0 and
proceeding in clockwise direction. Let b1 denote the first
neighbor encountered whose value is 1, and let c1 be the
(background) point immediately preceding b1 in the
sequence. Store the location of b0 and b1 for use in Step
5.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
2. Let b=b1 and c=c1
3. Let the 8-neighbors of b, starting at c and proceeding in a
clockwise direction, be denoted by n1,n2,...,n8. Find the
first nk labeled 1.
4. Let b=nk and c=nk-1
5. Repeat Step 3 and 4 until b=b0 and the boundary point
found is b1. The sequence of b points found when the
algorithm stops constitutes the set of ordered boundary
points.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
• The boundary-following algorithm works equally
well if a region, rather than its boundary, is given in
Fig.11.2
• That is, procedure extracts the outer boundary of a
binary region. If the objective is to find the
boundaries of holes in a region(these are called the
inner boundaries of the region), a simple approach is
to extract the holes, a simple approach is to extract
and treat them as 1-valued region on a background of
0s.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
• Chain Codes:
– Chain codes are used to represent a boundary by a
connected sequence of straight-line segments of
specified length and direction.
– Typically, this representation is based on 4- or 8-
connectivity of the segments. The direction of each
segment is coded by using a numbering scheme, as
in Fig.11.3
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
• The chain code of boundary depends on the starting point.
However, the code can be normalized with respect to starting
point by a straightforward procedure.
• We simply treat the chain code as a circular sequence of
direction numbers and redefine the starting point so that the
resulting sequence of numbers forms an integer of minimum
magnitude.
• We can normalize also for rotation (in angles that are integer
multiples of the directions in Fig. 11.3) by using the first
difference of the chain code instead of the code itself.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
Connected Components
• Components are objects that share at least one
common neighbor (in 4- or 8- neighborhood).
• Defn: A connected component labeling of
binary image B is a labeled image LB in
which the value of each pixel is the label of its
connected component.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
Region Properties
• Once a binary image has been processed we
could obtain properties about the regions in the
processed image.
• Some of those properties are
– Area, centroid, perimeter, perimeter length,
circularity of the region and second circularity
measure
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
Area and Centroid
• Area A = sum of all the 1-pixels in the region.
• Centroid [r’,c’] is the average location of the
pixels in the region
– r’ = 1/A*Sum of all the rows in the region
– c’ = 1/A*Sum of all the columns in the region.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
Perimeter
• A simple definiton of the perimeter of a region without holes i set
of its interior border pixels.
• A pixel of a region is a border pixel if it has some neighboring
pixel that is outside the region.
• When 8-connectivity is used to determine whether a pixel inside
the region is connected to a pixel outside the region, the resulting
set of perimeter pixel is 4-connected.
• When 4-connectivity is used to determine whether a pixel inside
the region is connected to a pixel outside the region, the resulting
set of perimeter pixel is 8-connected.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
The Perimeter:
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
The length of Perimeter
• To compute length |P| of perimeter P, the
pixels in P must be ordered in a sequence
P=<(r0,c0),. . . , (rk-1,ck-1)>, each pair of
successive pixels in the sequence being
neighbor, including the first and last pixels.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
Circularity(1):
• With the area A and perimeter P defined, a
common measure of the circularity of the
region is the length of the perimeter squared
divided by the area.
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
Digital Image Processing, 3rd ed.
Gonzalez & Woods
www.ImageProcessingPlace.com
Chapter 11
Representation and Description
© 1992–2008 R. C. Gonzalez & R. E. Woods
