Filling holes inside a binary object

I have a problem with filling white holes inside a black coins so that I can have only 0-255 binary image with filled black coins.. I have used Median filter to accomplish it but in that case connection bridge between coins grows and it goes impossible to recognize them after several times of erosion... So I need a simple floodFill like method in opencv

Here is my image with holes:

EDIT: floodfill like function must fill holes in big components without prompting X,Y coordinates as a seed...

EDIT: I tried to use cvDrawContours function but I doesn't fill contours inside bigger ones.

Here is my code:

        CvMemStorage mem = cvCreateMemStorage(0);
        CvSeq contours = new CvSeq();
        CvSeq ptr = new CvSeq();
        int sizeofCvContour = Loader.sizeof(CvContour.class);

        cvThreshold(gray, gray, 150, 255, CV_THRESH_BINARY_INV);

        int numOfContours = cvFindContours(gray, mem, contours, sizeofCvContour, CV_RETR_CCOMP, CV_CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE);
        System.out.println("The num of contours: "+numOfContours); //prints 87, ok

        Random rand = new Random();
        for (ptr = contours; ptr != null; ptr = ptr.h_next()) {
            Color randomColor = new Color(rand.nextFloat(), rand.nextFloat(), rand.nextFloat());
            CvScalar color = CV_RGB( randomColor.getRed(), randomColor.getGreen(), randomColor.getBlue());
            cvDrawContours(gray, ptr, color, color, -1, CV_FILLED, 8);
        }
        CanvasFrame canvas6  = new CanvasFrame("drawContours");
        canvas6.showImage(gray);

Result: (you can see black holes inside each coin)

There are two methods to do this:

1) Contour Filling :

First invert the image,find contours in the image, fill it with black and invert back.

des = cv2.bitwise_not(gray)
contour,hier = cv2.findContours(des,cv2.RETR_CCOMP,cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)

for cnt in contour:
    cv2.drawContours(des,[cnt],0,255,-1)

gray = cv2.bitwise_not(des)

Resulting image:

2) Image Opening:

kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE,(3,3))
res = cv2.morphologyEx(gray,cv2.MORPH_OPEN,kernel)

The resulting image as follows:

You can see, there is no much difference in both the cases.

NB: gray - grayscale image, All codes are in OpenCV-Python

A simple dilate and erode would close the gaps fairly well, I imagine. I think maybe this is what you're looking for.

A more robust solution would be to do an edge detect on the whole image, and then a hough transform for circles. A quick google shows there are code samples available in various languages for size invariant detection of circles using a hough transform, so hopefully that will give you something to go on.

The benefit of using the hough transform is that the algorithm will actually give you an estimate of the size and location of every circle, so you can rebuild an ideal image based on that model. It should also be very robust to overlap, especially considering the quality of the input image here (i.e. less worry about false positives, so can lower the threshold for results).

thiton

You might be looking for the Fillhole transformation, an application of morphological image reconstruction.

This transformation will fill the holes in your coins, even though at the cost of also filling all holes between groups of adjacent coins. The Hough space or opening-based solutions suggested by the other posters will probably give you better high-level recognition results.

Try using cvFindContours() function. You can use it to find connected components. With the right parameters this function returns a list with the contours of each connected components.

Find the contours which represent a hole. Then use cvDrawContours() to fill up the selected contour by the foreground color thereby closing the holes.

Faroq Al-tam

I think if the objects are touched or crowded, there will be some problems using the contours and the math morophology opening. Instead, the following simple solution is found and tested. It is working very well, and not only for this images, but also for any other images.

here is the steps (optimized) as seen in http://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2008/08/05/filling-small-holes/

let I: the input image

1. filled_I = floodfill(I). // fill every hole in the image.
2. inverted_I = invert(I)`.   
3. holes_I = filled_I AND inverted_I. // finds all holes 
4. cc_list = connectedcomponent(holes_I) // list of all connected component in holes_I.
5. holes_I = remove(cc_list,holes_I, smallholes_threshold_size) // remove all holes from holes_I having size > smallholes_threshold_size.
6. out_I = I OR holes_I. // fill only the small holes.

In short, the algorithm is just to find all holes, remove the big ones then write the small ones only on the original image.

I've been looking around the internet to find a proper imfill function (as the one in Matlab) but working in C with OpenCV. After some reaserches, I finally came up with a solution :

IplImage* imfill(IplImage* src)
{
    CvScalar white = CV_RGB( 255, 255, 255 );

    IplImage* dst = cvCreateImage( cvGetSize(src), 8, 3);
    CvMemStorage* storage = cvCreateMemStorage(0);
    CvSeq* contour = 0;

    cvFindContours(src, storage, &contour, sizeof(CvContour), CV_RETR_CCOMP, CV_CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE );
    cvZero( dst );

    for( ; contour != 0; contour = contour->h_next )
    {
        cvDrawContours( dst, contour, white, white, 0, CV_FILLED);
    }

    IplImage* bin_imgFilled = cvCreateImage(cvGetSize(src), 8, 1);
    cvInRangeS(dst, white, white, bin_imgFilled);

    return bin_imgFilled;
}

For this: Original Binary Image

Result is: Final Binary Image

The trick is in the parameters setting of the cvDrawContours function: cvDrawContours( dst, contour, white, white, 0, CV_FILLED);

dst = destination image
contour = pointer to the first contour
white = color used to fill the contour
0 = Maximal level for drawn contours. If 0, only contour is drawn
CV_FILLED = Thickness of lines the contours are drawn with. If it is negative (For example, =CV_FILLED), the contour interiors are drawn.