edge detection on digital images

I did this for the project proposal of D. Actually, there were no benefits for me to do this on digital images. I am working on point clouds which contains depth information, that is 3D image information.

However, it did not take me much time to do it. It was quite easy:

OpenCV is quite helpful on this aspect. I downloaded the source code from Canny Edge Detector tutorial

#include "opencv2/imgproc/imgproc.hpp"
#include "opencv2/highgui/highgui.hpp"
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

using namespace cv;

/// Global variables

Mat src, src_gray;
Mat dst, detected_edges;

int edgeThresh = 1;
int lowThreshold;
int const max_lowThreshold = 100;
int ratio = 3;
int kernel_size = 3;
char* window_name = "Edge Map";

/**
 * @function CannyThreshold
 * @brief Trackbar callback - Canny thresholds input with a ratio 1:3
 */
void CannyThreshold(int, void*)
{
  /// Reduce noise with a kernel 3x3
  blur( src_gray, detected_edges, Size(3,3) );

  /// Canny detector
  Canny( detected_edges, detected_edges, lowThreshold, lowThreshold*ratio, kernel_size );

  /// Using Canny's output as a mask, we display our result
  dst = Scalar::all(0);

  src.copyTo( dst, detected_edges);
  imshow( window_name, dst );
 }


/** @function main */
int main( int argc, char** argv )
{
  /// Load an image
  src = imread( argv[1] );

  if( !src.data )
  { return -1; }

  /// Create a matrix of the same type and size as src (for dst)
  dst.create( src.size(), src.type() );

  /// Convert the image to grayscale
  cvtColor( src, src_gray, CV_BGR2GRAY );

  /// Create a window
  namedWindow( window_name, CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE );

  /// Create a Trackbar for user to enter threshold
  createTrackbar( "Min Threshold:", window_name, &lowThreshold, max_lowThreshold, CannyThreshold );

  /// Show the image
  CannyThreshold(0, 0);

  /// Wait until user exit program by pressing a key
  waitKey(0);

  return 0;
  }

I made a ros package out of it by adding some dependencies in manifest.xml and executable in CMakeLists.txt.

Then I captured an photo of the object I wanted to detect with the toolbox a ROS package perception_pcl : convert_pointcloud_to_image

rosrun pcl_ros convert_pointcloud_to_image input:=/camera/dth_registered/points output:=/my_image

So, I got a topic published with image data, and then images could be generated by subscribing to the topic and right click on the image GUI. EASY!

rosrun image_view image_view image:=/my_image