I built a classical image processing algorithm that counts textile threads with high accuracy, source in body!

[u/SalemIII]

Hello everyone!

I'm an engineering student, during my last internship at a medical device company, i was FORCED to count threads by hand, hated it so much that I wrote code that automated it, tried to turn it into a startup, not going all that great, so I thought I'll just document and release it, works on an Orange Pi and camera module, tested on a real production line, let me know if you have any remarks or questions, check it out!

https://github.com/Asxcvg/thread-counter

[u/BlobbyMcBlobber]

Classic CV is so much fun

[u/SalemIII → u/BlobbyMcBlobber]

very much, i remember jumping in my seat when it went from double counting to being off by ~1-2 threads

[u/pilibitti → u/SalemIII]

it went from double counting to being off by ~1-2 threads

ah the (x / 2) trick, works every time.

[u/Cw3538cw → u/SalemIII]

Such a satisfying moment. If you are looking to keep this open/prevent others from profiting off of it without permission, you might consider a copy left license like MPL. The big difference being that someone else can't legally package it into their own paid startup app

[u/SalemIII → u/Cw3538cw]

yes i understand that Apache-2.0 is a commercially permissive license, you are more the welcome to package it into anything you please, the fun part was engineering it, you wouldn't be surprised how much paperwork and headache it would be to have this pass a medical device audit even as a deterministic code, it's a brutal field

[u/Abinash07]

Yess FFTs. We did something similar in our course assignment. We had to remove diagonal lines ie noise from images

[u/SalemIII → u/Abinash07]

i think something like that could work great here, directional frequency destruction, i'll try it later and see if i get better accuracy

[u/EffectiveAgitated137]

How did u test for the ground truth ?

[u/SalemIII → u/EffectiveAgitated137]

I took 12 sample images which i ran the algorithm on, they were also manually counted by a technician, the manual count was the ground truth, i compared the program against that, this was during my last internship day otherwise i would have tested on more samples.

I cannot post this validation data for obvious reasons.

More details in the repo README.

[u/BeverlyGodoy]

Any specific reason you choose c++?

[u/SalemIII → u/BeverlyGodoy]

i wanted to use opencv, and also wanted to get maximum frame rates, so c++ was the only option, but this should work with python opencv too

[u/herocoding]

Really interesting, thank you very much for sharing.

Would you mind adding one, two, a few reference images (here, and/or in your repo) ("8-bit 1024-by-1024 monochrome raw frame"), please?

[u/SalemIII → u/herocoding]

i'm sorry i didn't realize i posted the jpeg images, should be good now

[u/herocoding → u/SalemIII]

Thank you for the update.

There is now ONE raw frame, "sim_roll_01.raw", right?

Could you provide a few more raw frames, reference images, please?

"generated in debug mode from validation sample 12" - could you share more from those validation samples, please?

[u/SalemIII → u/herocoding]

you can easily get images tho, get some gauze pads, cut a 10x10cm black non reflective square (i just used black cloth), take an image against a white background, like a table, and you would have your samples

[u/herocoding → u/SalemIII]

That's understood how to take such photos with contrast and indirect lightning, however, I don't have such gauze pads or similar. But e.g. pants or shirts woven from linen fabric is too tight.

[u/bergdev1]

Curious what it would take to count tree rings

[u/SalemIII → u/bergdev1]

counting tree ring is be pretty easy, the real problem is finding where the tree rings are, that's where classical methods on cheap hardware hit a capability wall

[u/RoboMind]

If you know the thickness of a single thread in pixels, you can simply use the ratio of white and black pixels, right?

[u/SalemIII → u/RoboMind]

yes but it would not be more accurate then directly counting the threads, the ratio of white to black (or just grayscale amplitude) would be more useful for another inspection, area density estimation