drawing a bounding box in large images

Question

I have a large binary image (4k x 7k pix) from which I want to extract the entire yellow portion as a single rectangle. I tried binary erosion to even out features insi

Answer 1

As the image you provided includes distracting axes, and is the wrong colour and too small, I created as realistic a version as I could with ImageMagick like this in Terminal:

convert bbox.png -alpha off -crop 120x215+40+13 -colorspace gray -normalize -threshold 50% -scale 4200x7200\! bbox.png

The full-size version is 4200x7200.

I then wrote a numpy-based version of bbox as follows

#!/usr/local/bin/python3
import numpy as np
from PIL import Image

def bbox(image):
    """Find bounding box of image"""
    # Project all columns into row same width as image
    proj=np.any(image,axis=0)
    # Find first non-zero value from Left
    L=np.argmax(proj)
    # And right
    R=image.shape[1]-np.argmax(np.flipud(proj))-1
    # Project all rows into column same height as image
    proj=np.any(image,axis=1)
    # Find first non-zero value from Top
    T=np.argmax(proj)
    # And Bottom
    B=image.shape[0]-np.argmax(np.flipud(proj))-1
    return T,L,B,R

image=np.array(Image.open("a.png").convert("L"))
print(bbox(image))

That runs in 5.3ms on my Mac. Just for fun, I threaded it and ran the horizontal projection and vertical projection on separate parallel threads and it came down to 3.6ms with the same results.

#!/usr/local/bin/python3
import numpy as np
from PIL import Image

import threading
import queue

def DoOneDim(image,axis,q):
    """Find bounding box of image"""
    proj=np.any(image,axis=axis)
    # Find first non-zero value
    A=np.argmax(proj)
    # And and last
    B=image.shape[1-axis]-np.argmax(np.flipud(proj))-1
    q.put({axis:(A,B)})


def bboxTh(image):
    """Threaded version of bbox() that does vertical and horizontal on their own theads"""
    q = queue.Queue()
    Hthread=threading.Thread(target=DoOneDim, args=(image,0,q))
    Vthread=threading.Thread(target=DoOneDim, args=(image,1,q))
    Hthread.start()
    Vthread.start()
    Hthread.join()
    Vthread.join()
    results=dict()
    while not q.empty():
       results.update(q.get())
    return results

image=np.array(Image.open("a.png").convert("L"))
print(bboxTh(image))

The identified box looks likes this: