Really simple C Library containing various image processing algorithms. It includes Python 3 bindings designed to operate on Pillow images (PIL.Image).
The C library depends only on the libc. The Python bindings depend only on Pillow.
APIs are designed to be as simple to use as possible. Default values are provided for every parameters.
Python 2.x is not supported.
Available algorithms are listed below.
- Unpaper's algorithms
- Blackfilter
- Noisefilter
- Blurfilter
- Masks
- Grayfilter
- Border
- Canny edge detection
- Sobel operator
- Gaussian blur
- ACE (Automatic Color Equalization ; Parallelized implementation)
- SWT (Stroke Width Transformation)
- Compare: Compare two images (grayscale) and makes the pixels that are different really visible (red).
- Scan borders: Tries to detect the borders of a page in an image coming from a scanner.
The Python API can be compiled, installed and used without installing the C library.
Latest release :
$ sudo pip3 install pypillowfight
Development version :
$ git clone https://github.com/openpaperwork/libpillowfight.git
$ cd libpillowfight
# Both C library and Python module
$ make
$ sudo make install # will run python3 ./setup.py install + make install (CMake)
# Or just the Python bindings
$ make build_py
$ make install_py # will run only python3 ./setup.py install
For each algorithm, a function is available. It takes a PIL.Image instance as parameter. It may take other optionnal parameters. The return value is another PIL.Image instance.
Example:
import pillowfight
input_img = PIL.Image.open("tests/data/brightness_problem.png")
output_img = pillowfight.ace(input_img)
make check # will check style
make test # will run the tests (will require pytest)
Test reference images are made on amd64. They should match also on i386. On other architectures however, due to slight differences regarding floating point numbers, results may vary slightly and tests may not pass.
# C library only (will use CMake)
$ make build_c
$ sudo make install_c
For each algorithm, a function is available. It takes a struct pf_bitmap
as input. As output, it fills in another struct pf_bitmap
.
struct pf_bitmap
is a really simple structure:
struct pf_bitmap {
struct {
int x;
int y;
} size;
union pf_pixel *pixels;
};
(struct pf_bitmap).size.x
is the width of the image.
(struct pf_bitmap).size.y
is the height of the image.
union pf_pixel
are basically 32 bits integers, defined in a manner convenient
to retrieve each color independantly (RGB). Each color is on one byte. 4th byte is
unused (no alpha channel taken into account).
(struct pf_bitmap).pixels
must points to a memory area containing the image.
The image must contains x * y * union pf_pixel
.
$ gcc -Wall -Werror -lpillowfight -o test test.c
Many algorithms in this library are re-implementations of algorithms used by Unpaper. To make the API simpler to use (.. and implement), a lot of settings have been hard-coded.
Unpaper applies them in the following order:
- Blackfilter
- Noisefilter
- Blurfilter
- Masks
- Grayfilter
- Border
I would advise applying automatic color equalization (ACE) first.
A basic documentation for some of the algorithms can be found in Unpaper's documentation.
Input | Output |
---|---|
Black border problem | ACE + Unpapered |
Brightness problem | ACE + Unpapered |
Input | Output |
---|---|
Brightness problem | Corrected |
This algorithm is quite slow (~40s for one big image with one thread on my machine). So this version is parallelized (down to ~15s on a 4 cores computer).
out_img = pillowfight.ace(img_in,
slope=10,
limit=1000,
samples=100,
seed=None)
Use as many threads as there are cores on the computer (up to 32).
This algorithm uses random number. If you need consistent results (for unit tests for instance), you can specify a seed for the random number generator. Otherwise, time.time() will be used.
#define PF_DEFAULT_ACE_SLOPE 10
#define PF_DEFAULT_ACE_LIMIT 1000
#define PF_DEFAULT_ACE_NB_SAMPLES 100
#define PF_DEFAULT_ACE_NB_THREADS 2
extern void pf_ace(const struct pf_bitmap *in, struct pf_bitmap *out,
int nb_samples, double slope, double limit,
int nb_threads);
This function uses random numbers coming (rand()
).
You should call srand()
before calling this function.
- "A new algorithm for unsupervised global and local color correction." - A. Rizzi, C. Gatta and D. Marini
- http://argmax.jp/index.php?colorcorrect
This algorithm tries to find page borders in a scanned image. It is designed to operate on images coming from a flatbed scanner or a scanner with an automatic document feeder.
This algorithms looks for horizontal and vertical lines, and return the smallest rectangle that includes all those lines. To get the lines, it runs the Sobel operator on the input image and only keep the points with an angle of [0°, 90°, 180°, 270°] ±5°.
This algorithm does not always work:
- It's quite sensible to noise: dust, hair, etc may easily be counted erroneously as lines.
- Some scanners or drivers (most of Brother scanners for instance) "clean up" the image before returning it. Unfortunately they often remove most of the page borders in the process.
Still, this algorithm can help users of GUI applications by pre-selecting a cropping area.
Input | Output |
---|---|
brother_mfc7360n | (56, 8, 1637, 2275) |
epson_xp425 | (4, 5, 2484, 3498) |
brother_ds620 | (3, 3, 2507, 3527) |
frame = pillowfight.find_scan_borders(img_in)
struct pf_point {
int x;
int y;
};
struct pf_rectangle {
struct pf_point a;
struct pf_point b;
};
struct pf_rectangle pf_find_scan_borders(const struct pf_bitmap *img_in);
Input | Output |
---|---|
Crappy background | Canny output |
img_out = pillowfight.canny(img_in)
extern void pf_canny(const struct pf_bitmap *in, struct pf_bitmap *out);
- "A computational Approach to Edge Detection" - John Canny
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canny_edge_detector
Simple algorithm showing the difference between two images. Note that it converts the images to grayscale first.
It accepts a parameter 'tolerance': For each pixel, the difference with the corresponding pixel from the other image is computed. If the difference is between 0 and 'tolerance', it is ignored (pixels are considered equal).
Input | Input2 | Output |
---|---|---|
Black border problem | Black border problem + blackfilter | Diff |
(nb_diff, out_img) = pillowfight.compare(img_in, img_in2, tolerance=10)
extern int pf_compare(const struct pf_bitmap *in, const struct pf_bitmap *in2,
struct pf_bitmap *out, int tolerance);
Returns the number of pixels that are different between both images.
Input | Output |
---|---|
Crappy background | Gaussed |
One of the parameters is sigma
. If it is equals to 0.0, it will be computed automatically
using the following formula (same as OpenCV):
sigma = 0.3 * ((nb_stddev - 1) * 0.5 - 1) + 0.8;
img_out = pillowfight.gaussian(img_in, sigma=2.0, nb_stddev=5)
extern void pf_gaussian(const struct pf_bitmap *in, struct pf_bitmap *out,
double sigma, int nb_stddev);
Input | Output |
---|---|
Crappy background | Sobel |
img_out = pillowfight.sobel(img_in)
extern void pf_sobel(const struct pf_bitmap *in_img, struct pf_bitmap *out_img);
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239398674_An_Isotropic_3_3_Image_Gradient_Operator
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobel_operator
This algorithm extracts text from natural scenes images.
To find text, it looks for strokes. Note that it doesn't appear to work well on scanned documents because strokes are too small.
This implementation can provide the output in 3 different ways:
- Black & White : Detected text is black. Background is white.
- Grayscale : Detected text is gray. Its exact color is proportional to the stroke width detected.
- Original boxes : The rectangle around the detected is copied as is in the output image. Rest of the image is white.
(following examples are with original boxes)
# SWT_OUTPUT_BW_TEXT = 0 # default
# SWT_OUTPUT_GRAYSCALE_TEXT = 1
# SWT_OUTPUT_ORIGINAL_BOXES = 2
img_out = pillowfight.swt(img_in, output_type=pillowfight.SWT_OUTPUT_ORIGINAL_BOXES)
enum pf_swt_output
{
PF_SWT_OUTPUT_BW_TEXT = 0,
PF_SWT_OUTPUT_GRAYSCALE_TEXT,
PF_SWT_OUTPUT_ORIGINAL_BOXES,
};
#define PF_DEFAULT_SWT_OUTPUT PF_SWT_OUTPUT_BW_TEXT
extern void pf_swt(const struct pf_bitmap *in_img, struct pf_bitmap *out_img,
enum pf_swt_output output_type);
- "Detecting Text in Natural Scenes with Stroke Width Transform" - Boris Epshtein, Eyal Ofek, Yonatan Wexler
- https://github.com/aperrau/DetectText
Input | Output | Diff |
---|---|---|
Black border problem | Filtered | Diff |
img_out = pillowfight.unpaper_blackfilter(img_in)
extern void pf_unpaper_blackfilter(const struct pf_bitmap *in, struct pf_bitmap *out);
- https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper
- https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper/blob/master/doc/basic-concepts.md
Input | Output | Diff |
---|---|---|
Black border problem | Filtered | Diff |
img_out = pillowfight.unpaper_blurfilter(img_in)
extern void pf_unpaper_blurfilter(const struct pf_bitmap *in, struct pf_bitmap *out);
- https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper
- https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper/blob/master/doc/basic-concepts.md
Input | Output | Diff |
---|---|---|
Black border problem 3 | Border | Diff |
img_out = pillowfight.unpaper_border(img_in)
extern void pf_unpaper_border(const struct pf_bitmap *in, struct pf_bitmap *out);
- https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper
- https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper/blob/master/doc/basic-concepts.md
Input | Output | Diff |
---|---|---|
Black border problem 3 | Filterd | Diff |
img_out = pillowfight.unpaper_grayfilter(img_in)
extern void pf_unpaper_grayfilter(const struct pf_bitmap *in, struct pf_bitmap *out);
- https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper
- https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper/blob/master/doc/basic-concepts.md
Input | Output | Diff |
---|---|---|
Black border problem 2 | Masks | Diff |
img_out = pillowfight.unpaper_masks(img_in)
extern void pf_unpaper_masks(const struct pf_bitmap *in, struct pf_bitmap *out);
- https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper
- https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper/blob/master/doc/basic-concepts.md
Input | Output | Diff |
---|---|---|
Black border problem | Filtered | Diff |
img_out = pillowfight.unpaper_noisefilter(img_in)
extern void pf_unpaper_noisefilter(const struct pf_bitmap *in, struct pf_bitmap *out);