Name: Towards AI Legal Name: Towards AI, Inc. Description: Towards AI is the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) and technology publication. Read by thought-leaders and decision-makers around the world. Phone Number: +1-650-246-9381 Email: [email protected]
228 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003 United States
Website: Publisher: https://towardsai.net/#publisher Diversity Policy: https://towardsai.net/about Ethics Policy: https://towardsai.net/about Masthead: https://towardsai.net/about
Name: Towards AI Legal Name: Towards AI, Inc. Description: Towards AI is the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) and technology publication. Founders: Roberto Iriondo, , Job Title: Co-founder and Advisor Works for: Towards AI, Inc. Follow Roberto: X, LinkedIn, GitHub, Google Scholar, Towards AI Profile, Medium, ML@CMU, FreeCodeCamp, Crunchbase, Bloomberg, Roberto Iriondo, Generative AI Lab, Generative AI Lab Denis Piffaretti, Job Title: Co-founder Works for: Towards AI, Inc. Louie Peters, Job Title: Co-founder Works for: Towards AI, Inc. Louis-François Bouchard, Job Title: Co-founder Works for: Towards AI, Inc. Cover:
Towards AI Cover
Logo:
Towards AI Logo
Areas Served: Worldwide Alternate Name: Towards AI, Inc. Alternate Name: Towards AI Co. Alternate Name: towards ai Alternate Name: towardsai Alternate Name: towards.ai Alternate Name: tai Alternate Name: toward ai Alternate Name: toward.ai Alternate Name: Towards AI, Inc. Alternate Name: towardsai.net Alternate Name: pub.towardsai.net
5 stars – based on 497 reviews

Frequently Used, Contextual References

TODO: Remember to copy unique IDs whenever it needs used. i.e., URL: 304b2e42315e

Resources

Unlock the full potential of AI with Building LLMs for Productionβ€”our 470+ page guide to mastering LLMs with practical projects and expert insights!

Publication

Image Segmentation of Rotating iPhone With Scikit-image
Latest   Machine Learning

Image Segmentation of Rotating iPhone With Scikit-image

Last Updated on July 26, 2023 by Editorial Team

Author(s): Dmitri Azarnyh

Originally published on Towards AI.

Modern devices are full of different sensors: front and back cameras, accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, GPS, etc. Smart use of these devices allows for a large number of interesting applications such as compass, location detection, and games.

Photo by Nikita Vinogradov on Unsplash. Try to segment this cat from the background πŸ™‚

One such application is to detect the orientation of an iPhone in space which can be accomplished with data from the accelerometer and gyroscope. In the previous blog post, I wrote about the detection of iPhone orientation around one axis with data from two sensors of iPhone: gyroscope and accelerometer. The reconstruction of iPhone orientation was compared with the video. The results of the orientation reconstructed with sensors were a good qualitative match with the orientation depicted in the video:

Image by author

In this blog post, I present the way to extract the angle of iPhone inclination from the video with image segmentation. Then, I show the comparison of an error between two ways of measurement. Let me guide you through.

Video preparation

Before starting with the segmentation, there are a few things to prepare. My video was recorded with an iPhone and had a variate frame rate. To synchronize video clocks with sensor clocks, a constant frame rate is preferable. So, the first step would be to transfer the video to a constant frame rate. The next step would be to split the video into images where each frame corresponds to a jpeg image. The whole dataset of images can be found here.

Deep learning approach with Mask-R-CNN

When we talk about the segmentation of an image, it’s a great temptation to try some cool deep learning algorithm and hope that it will work. Following this temptation, I tried pre-trained Mask-RCNN. Fortunately, a cell phone is one of the classes the original model was trained on. The first result was quite impressive, as shown in the picture below:

Image by author

However, with a closer investigation, it appears that some images of the iPhone were misidentified (see the picture below):

Image by author

Like in many real-life data science projects, the results of the deep learning model are surprisingly good but do not fully deliver what is expected. At least not for the whole dataset. One option to overcome this challenge would be to label the data and fine-tune the original model. However, given the fact that it’s a red iPhone on an almost white background, there should be some easier ways. Let us have a look at them.

Classical CV approach with RGB image

To segment an image, we first try using a 3-channel RGB representation of an image that is short from red, green, and blue. Red would correspond to the first number that is very high, while the second and the third numbers are expected to be low, somewhat like (255,0,0). In this case, we can just choose all red pixels and hope that it will be the iPhone. To capture more shadows of red, I tried to filter all pixels which have a color value for the first channel (red) bigger than 130. For the second and the third channels, I filter the pixels which are lower than 60. Here is the code.

Such an approach produces reasonably good results:

Image by author

There is also a camera β€œhole” in the iPhone, which is black and was hence not segmented. We can fill out this hole with scikit-image tools:

One has to set up the area of the holes to fill out and small objects to filter out. I choose 40000 as the area. Now the segmentation does include the cameras of the iPhone:

Image by author

So, the segmentation based on red color in RGB representation works well on one image. However, after running this threshold-based algorithm through all images, I found that there are some segmentation inaccuracies:

Image by author

These inaccuracies could be fixed by manipulating thresholds on red, green, and blue colors. However, if we relax the parameters, the mask starts to capture brown color:

Image by author

It’s still possible to play around with thresholds in RGB. However, there are at least three parameters to tune (thresholds in red, green, and blue). Much easier would be to reduce it to only one tunable parameter. For that purpose, we can consider the iPhone image in a different color representation.

Classical CV approach with HED image

In the scikit-image library, several transformations are available from the RGB to different color representations. One of the challenges which I experience in working with the images of rotating iPhones is the separation from dark red and brown. This color separation is well addressed in the Haematoxylin-Eosin-DAB (HED) color space, where Hematoxylin has a deep blue-purple, Eosin is pinkish, and DAB is brown. Red iPhone is quite well detected with Eosin channel of such a color representation, which fixes the issue of mixing it up with brown, as brown is presented as DAB. In the HED representation, we have only one threshold in the Eosin channel to tune. The mask for the images which are challenging for RGB is captured correctly based on the Eosin channel and threshold of 0.05.

Image by author

Scikit-image also provides tools to measure the properties of the segmented region. Among other properties, it’s possible to measure the orientation of the iPhone:

The full segmentation algorithm would result to:

A qualitative comparison would result to:

Image by author

Quantitative Comparison

Now it’s possible to compare the inclination angle, which is derived from segmentation, with the one derived from sensors data. It gives a good match:

Image by author

The absolute error between sensors and interpolated values of video are:

Image by author

We can see that faster rotation results in higher errors between the two methods. That is also seen on the plot of the rolling mean of the rotational speed of preceding 0.5 sec versus the error:

Image by author

P.S.: I want to thank my wife Katya and Vladislav Rosov for helping with the post.

Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming aΒ sponsor.

Published via Towards AI

Feedback ↓