Assignment 1

0. Getting familiar with Matlab

Matlab is available from ITC for computers connected to the UVa network (look here for details). You should also be able to run it remotely from any Unix workstation (you may find the -nodesktop option useful).

Read through any or all of the following for a basic introduction to Matlab

• A short Matlab introduction
• Matlab tutorials
• The demos accessible by typing "demo" within Matlab.

Work through the following tasks using an image of your choice. You do not need to submit any results, but make sure you are comfortable doing the following:

1. Read an image into a variable.
   Hint #1: "help imread"
   Hint #2: Use single quotes around the filename.
   Hint #3: Ending a command with a semicolon supresses printing the result.
   
   
2. Display the image.
   Hint: "help image"
   
   
3. Adjust the axes so that the aspect ratio is 1:1 (i.e., "square pixels").
   Hint: "help axis"
   
   
4. Convert the image to grayscale.
   Hint: "help rgb2gray"

   Note: if your version of Matlab doesn't have the rgb2gray function, download rgb2gray.m. Place this in your working directory, and it should be auto-loaded by Matlab.

5. Convert the grayscale image to floating point.
   Hint: "help double"
   
   
6. Display the floating-point image, using a grayscale colormap.
   Hint #1: "colormap(gray)"
   Hint #2: "help imagesc"
   
   
7. Plot the intensities along one scanline of the image.
   Hint #1: Extracting a part of a matrix is done by

   matrix2 = matrix1(row_min:row_max,col_min:col_max);
   

   Indices in Matlab are 1-based (not 0-based as in C).
   row_max or col_max may be "end" to indicate the last element.
   Just a ":" is equivalent to "1:end".
   Hint #2: "help plot"
   
   
8. Store the width and height of the image in variables "width" and "height".
   Hint #1: "help size"
   Hint #2: Functions in Matlab may return multiple values. You can get at the values using the notation

   [var1, var2] = func(x)
   

   Hint #3: In Matlab, the number of rows is the first dimension and the number of columns is the second.
   
   
9. Write a pair of nested "for" loops to set a grid of every 10th pixel horizontally and every 20th pixel vertically to 0.
   Hint #1: "help for"
   Hint #2: "start:increment:stop"
   
   
10. Create a function "maxrow" that takes a matrix and a row index and returns the brightest pixel in the given row. Store the function in a file called "maxrow.m" so that Matlab loads it automatically when you call the function.
    Hint #1: "help function"
    Hint #2: Matlab has many built-in functions that operate on entire vectors or matrices. There might be one to compute the maximum...
    
    
11. Write the modified image back to a new file.
    Hint #1: "help uint8" to convert the image back to integer
    Hint #2: "help imwrite"
    
    

If you get stuck on any of these, please ask for help, either by contacting the instructor or by asking a colleague.

1. Canny edge detector (65%)

• Filtered gradient:
  1. Load an image
  2. Find the x and y components of the gradient Fx and Fy of the image smoothed with a Gaussian.
  3. Compute the edge strength F (the magnitude of the gradient) and edge orientation D = arctan(Fy/Fx) at each pixel.
  Hint #1: Recall that a 2D Gaussian is separable, and that finding the derivative of a function convolved with a Gaussian is the same as convolving with the derivative of a Gaussian.
  Hint #2: "help conv2", especially the syntax for independently convolving rows and columns
  
  
• Nonmaximum suppression:
  Create a "thinned edge image" I(x,y) as follows:
  1. For each pixel find the direction D* in (0, 45, 90, 135) that is closest to the orientation D at that pixel.
  2. If the edge strength F(x,y) is smaller than at least one of its neighbors along D*, set I(x,y) = 0, else set I(x,y) = F(x,y).
  
  
• Hysteresis thresholding:
  Repeatedly do the following:
  1. Locate the next unvisited pixel (x,y) such that I(x,y) > T_h.
  2. Starting from (x,y), follow the chain of connected local maxima, in both directions, as long as I(x,y) > T_l.
  3. Mark each pixel as it is visited.

Test your alogrithm on images of your choosing, experimenting with different values of the parameters sigma (the width of the Gaussian used for smoothing), T_h (the "high" threshold), and T_l (the "low" threshold). Also run your algorithm on the following images:

• mandrill.jpg: Try different parameter values.
• building.jpg: Try to find parameter settings that detect the edges of bricks and the building and those that find only the edges of the buildings.
• Also run your edge detector on a few images from Flickr.

2. Corner detector (35%)

• Filtered gradient: Same as above for the Canny edge detector.
• Finding corners:
  1. Compute the covariance matrix C over a neighborhood around each point.
  2. Compute the smaller eigenvalue of C.
     Hint: "help eig"
  3. Save all points at which the smaller eigenvalue l2 is greater than a threshold into a list L.
• Nonmaximum suppresion:
  1. Sort L in decreasing order of l2.
     Hint: "help sortrows"
  2. For each point p, remove all points in the neighborhood of p that occur lower in L.

Test your algorithm on the building image above, and on checker.jpg. (This is a picture of a target used for camera calibration. Note the barrel distortion in this lens.) Explore the effects of changing sigma (the width of the Gaussian), the size of the neighborhood, and the threshold.

3. Extra credit

Experiment with heuristics for automatically determining the thresholds to be used for each image. Some of these are mentioned in Trucco and Verri, but feel free to be creative and come up with your own.

Submitting

This assignment is due Monday, February 14, 2011 at 11:55 PM EST. Please see the general notes on submitting your assignments, as well as the late policy and the collaboration policy.

Please submit:

• Your edge and corner detection code (as one or more .m files).
• For each test image, images showing the smoothed horizontal and vertical gradient, the gradient magnitude, and the gradient magnitude after nonmaximum suppression.
• The results of your edge and corner detectors on the provided sample images (using the best parameters you were able to find).
• A WRITEUP.html file that contains all of the images described above along with a description of your experiments with different parameters, and any relevant implementation notes. This is extremely important. Submissions that do not include a WRITEUP.html file will receive a grade of ZERO.

Note that programming in Matlab is not an excuse to write unreadable code. You are expected to use good programming style, including meaningful variable names, a comment or three describing what the code is doing, etc. Also, all images you submit should have been saved with the "imwrite" function - do not submit screen captures of the image window.