CONTOUR DETECTION

in Computer Vision

Presented By

T.LAHARI
V.ANEESHA

III/IV BTECH
III/IV BTECH

IT
IT

lahari_thammana@yahoo.com
aneesha_janardhan@yahoo.com

Ph: 9347526507 Ph:

9703251812
 V.R.SIDDHARTHA ENGINEERING
COLLEGE(AUTONOMOUS)
VIJAYAWADA
ABSTRACT:
Computer vision is a scientific discipline, concerned with the theory behind
artificial systems that extract information from images. The fields most closely related
to computer vision are image processing, image analysis and machine vision. Image
analysis is the extraction of meaningful information from images; mainly from digital
images by means of digital image processing techniques.

INTRODUCTION

Definition:

The term Contour can be defined as an outline or a boundary of an object. Hence,

Contour detection deals with detecting various objects in an image specifically. Use
of contour detection in image processing is to locate objects and their boundaries in
images.

Contour detection and Edge detection:

In general, contour detection follows edge detection, which is a process of

identifying points in a digital image at which the image brightness changes sharply.
The main difference between edge detection and contour detection is that in edge
detection, edges are drawn based on intensity variations from pixel-to-pixel where as
contours are salient region boundaries in an image. Hence, specific identification of
objects is possible only through contours.
 Outputs of Edge detection

Outputs of the Contour detection

The output of edge detection includes every small edge in the input image and this
gives rise to confusion in detecting the individual objects specifically. So, this output
is further analysed by removing the unimportant lines and noises and showing only
the important edges which help in the extraction of meaningful information from that
image. In the above examples we can see that the outputs of edge detection include
every small edge and hence it is not possible to deduce some information like the
number of animals in the image and the exact shapes of the individual objects due to
many unimportant small edges, where as in the outputs of the contour detection,
these unwanted unimportant edges are removed and only the salient region
boundaries are shown, which give all the information about the objects in the image.

CONTOUR LINES

Contour lines are the lines joining points of equal elevation (height) above a given
level. These are used in the construction of Contour maps, which show valleys and
hills, and the steepness of slopes. The contour interval of a contour map is the
difference in elevation between successive contour lines.

APPLICATIONS of CONTOUR LINES:

• Meteorological contour maps may present collected data such as actual air
pressure at a given time, or generalized data such as average pressure over
a period of time, or forecast data such as predicted air pressure at some point
in the future.
• In Oceanography, contours are used as isobathytherms, lines showing
depths of water with equal temperature, isohalines, lines of equal ocean
salinity and Isopycnals, which are surfaces of equal water density.
• Contour lines are used in Topography to study various factors like the number
of mountain peaks in a region, the height of these peaks, and the shapes of
islands can also be determined using these contours.
Contour lines are drawn by joining points which are at same height from the sea
level. This helps in estimating the height of a peak accurately. Also by viewing the
same contour map in the top view, we can determine the exact shape of the regions
or islands based on the contour lines along with the number of peaks in that region.
When there are less number of points of equal elevation located closely, they form
smaller circles on the contour maps, these are nothing but mountain peaks. In the
same way, the steep slopes can be identified as the closely located contour lines
which almost overlap each other.

Contour Detection:
There are currently two main types of active contours:
1) Parametric active contours, which represent contours explicitly as parameterized
curves and
2) Geometric active contours, which represent contours implicitly as level sets of
two-dimensional scalar functions.

SNAKE CONOTURS:

Snake is an energy minimizing, deformable spline influenced by constraint and

image forces that pull it towards object contours. Snakes are greatly used in
applications like object tracking, shape recognition, segmentation, edge detection,
stereo matching.

geodesic: The shortest line between two points (on a mathematically defined
surface).

geodesic active contour: An active contour model similar to the snake model in
that it attempts to minimize an energy function between the model and the data, but
which also incorporates a geometrical model.

geodesic active region: A technique for region based

segmentation that builds on geodesic active contours by adding a
force that takes into account information within regions. Typically
a geodesic active region will be bounded by a single geodesic
active contour.

geodesic distance: The length of the shortest path between two

points along some surface. This is different from the Euclidean
distance that takes no account of the surface. The following
example shows the geodesic distance between Calgary and
London (following the curvature of the Earth).
geodesic transform: Assigns to each point the geodesic
distance to some feature or class of feature.