If you're just wanting (semi) contiguous regions, there's already an easy implementation in Python: SciPy's ndimage.morphology module. This is a fairly common image morphology operation.
Basically, you have 5 steps:
def find_paws(data, smooth_radius=5, threshold=0.0001):
data = sp.ndimage.uniform_filter(data, smooth_radius)
thresh = data > threshold
filled = sp.ndimage.morphology.binary_fill_holes(thresh)
coded_paws, num_paws = sp.ndimage.label(filled)
data_slices = sp.ndimage.find_objects(coded_paws)
return object_slices
Blur the input data a bit to make sure the paws have a continuous footprint. (It would be more efficient to just use a larger kernel (the structure kwarg to the various scipy.ndimage.morphology functions) but this isn't quite working properly for some reason...)
Threshold the array so that you have a boolean array of places where the pressure is over some threshold value (i.e. thresh = data > value)
Fill any internal holes, so that you have cleaner regions (filled = sp.ndimage.morphology.binary_fill_holes(thresh))
Find the separate contiguous regions (coded_paws, num_paws = sp.ndimage.label(filled)). This returns an array with the regions coded by number (each region is a contiguous area of a unique integer (1 up to the number of paws) with zeros everywhere else)).
Isolate the contiguous regions using data_slices = sp.ndimage.find_objects(coded_paws). This returns a list of tuples of slice objects, so you could get the region of the data for each paw with [data[x] for x in data_slices]. Instead, we'll draw a rectangle based on these slices, which takes slightly more work.
The two animations below show your "Overlapping Paws" and "Grouped Paws" example data. This method seems to be working perfectly. (And for whatever it's worth, this runs much more smoothly than the GIF images below on my machine, so the paw detection algorithm is fairly fast...)
Here's a full example (now with much more detailed explanations). The vast majority of this is reading the input and making an animation. The actual paw detection is only 5 lines of code.
import numpy as np
import scipy as sp
import scipy.ndimage
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.patches import Rectangle
def animate(input_filename):
"""Detects paws and animates the position and raw data of each frame
in the input file"""
infile = paw_file(input_filename)
plt.ion()
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
fig.suptitle(input_filename)
im = ax.imshow(infile.next()[1])
rects = [Rectangle((0,0), 1,1, fc='none', ec='red') for i in range(4)]
[ax.add_patch(rect) for rect in rects]
title = ax.set_title('Time 0.0 ms')
for time, frame in infile:
paw_slices = find_paws(frame)
[rect.set_visible(False) for rect in rects]
for slice, rect in zip(paw_slices, rects):
dy, dx = slice
rect.set_xy((dx.start, dy.start))
rect.set_width(dx.stop - dx.start + 1)
rect.set_height(dy.stop - dy.start + 1)
rect.set_visible(True)
title.set_text('Time %0.2f ms' % time)
im.set_data(frame)
im.set_clim([frame.min(), frame.max()])
fig.canvas.draw()
def find_paws(data, smooth_radius=5, threshold=0.0001):
"""Detects and isolates contiguous regions in the input array"""
data = sp.ndimage.uniform_filter(data, smooth_radius)
thresh = data > threshold
filled = sp.ndimage.morphology.binary_fill_holes(thresh)
coded_paws, num_paws = sp.ndimage.label(filled)
data_slices = sp.ndimage.find_objects(coded_paws)
return data_slices
def paw_file(filename):
"""Returns a iterator that yields the time and data in each frame
The infile is an ascii file of timesteps formatted similar to this:
Frame 0 (0.00 ms)
0.0 0.0 0.0
0.0 0.0 0.0
Frame 1 (0.53 ms)
0.0 0.0 0.0
0.0 0.0 0.0
...
"""
with open(filename) as infile:
while True:
try:
time, data = read_frame(infile)
yield time, data
except StopIteration:
break
def read_frame(infile):
"""Reads a frame from the infile."""
frame_header = infile.next().strip().split()
time = float(frame_header[-2][1:])
data = []
while True:
line = infile.next().strip().split()
if line == []:
break
data.append(line)
return time, np.array(data, dtype=np.float)
if __name__ == '__main__':
animate('Overlapping paws.bin')
animate('Grouped up paws.bin')
animate('Normal measurement.bin')
Update: As far as identifying which paw is in contact with the sensor at what times, the simplest solution is to just do the same analysis, but use all of the data at once. (i.e. stack the input into a 3D array, and work with it, instead of the individual time frames.) Because SciPy's ndimage functions are meant to work with n-dimensional arrays, we don't have to modify the original paw-finding function at all.
def paw_regions(infile):
data, time = [], []
for t, frame in paw_file(infile):
time.append(t)
data.append(frame)
data = np.dstack(data)
time = np.asarray(time)
data_slices, coded_paws = find_paws(data, smooth_radius=4)
data_slices.sort(key=lambda dat_slice: dat_slice[2].start)
fig = plt.figure()
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(2,1,1)
annotate_paw_prints(time, data, data_slices, ax=ax1)
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(2,1,2)
plot_paw_impacts(time, data_slices, ax=ax2)
fig.suptitle(infile)
def plot_paw_impacts(time, data_slices, ax=None):
if ax is None:
ax = plt.gca()
for i, dat_slice in enumerate(data_slices):
dx, dy, dt = dat_slice
paw = i%4 + 1
ax.barh(bottom=paw, width=time[dt].ptp(), height=0.2,
left=time[dt].min(), align='center', color='red')
ax.set_yticks(range(1, 5))
ax.set_yticklabels(['Paw 1', 'Paw 2', 'Paw 3', 'Paw 4'])
ax.set_xlabel('Time (ms) Since Beginning of Experiment')
ax.yaxis.grid(True)
ax.set_title('Periods of Paw Contact')
def annotate_paw_prints(time, data, data_slices, ax=None):
if ax is None:
ax = plt.gca()
ax.imshow(data.sum(axis=2).T)
x, y = [], []
for i, region in enumerate(data_slices):
dx, dy, dz = region
x0 = 0.5 * (dx.start + dx.stop)
y0 = 0.5 * (dy.start + dy.stop)
x.append(x0); y.append(y0)
ax.annotate('Paw %i' % (i%4 +1), (x0, y0),
color='red', ha='center', va='bottom')
ax.plot(x,y, '-wo')
ax.axis('image')
ax.set_title('Order of Steps')
