Question

Making the usual blob tracker with OpenCV and cvBlobsLib, I’ve come across this problem and it seems no one else had it, which makes me sad. I get the RGB/BGR frame, choose the color to isolate, treshold it into b/w, find the blobs and add the bounding rectangle on each blob, but when I display the final image, the box is stretched on the x-axis: when the object is on the left the box is close to it (although around 2.5 times larger), and as it moves to the right the box moves faster (= more and more far from the object) until it reaches the right end of the window when the object isn’t even halfway. This doesn’t happen on the y-axis, where everything is fine. It’s not a problem with rectangles, it happens when I use fillBlob aswell, the blob shape comes out stretched and misaligned. Also, it’s not a problem related to image capturing, since I’ve tried with kinect (OpenNI), webcam and even using a single image (imread()), and I verified that every ImageGenerator, Mat, IplImage used were 640×480, 8bit depth, for which I used AUTOSIZE for the namedWindow (enlarging to fullscreen window doesn’t help either). Showing the BGR frame and the tresholded image gives no problems, they both fit into the window, but the detected blobs seem to belong to a different resolution space when I merge them with the original image. Here’s the code, not much has changed from the usual examples found online everywhere:

//[...]
namedWindow("Color Image", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE);
namedWindow("Color Tracking", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE);
//[...] I already got the two cv::Mat I need, imgBGR and imgTresh
CBlobResult blobs;
CBlob *currentBlob;
Point pt1, pt2;
Rect rect;

//had to do Mat to IplImage conversion, since cvBlobsLib doesn't like mats
IplImage iplTresh = imgTresh;
IplImage iplBGR = imgBGR;

blobs = CBlobResult(&iplTresh, NULL, 0);
blobs.Filter(blobs, B_EXCLUDE, CBlobGetArea(), B_LESS, 100);
int nBlobs = blobs.GetNumBlobs();
for (int i = 0; i < nBlobs; i++)
{
    currentBlob = blobs.GetBlob(i);
    rect = currentBlob->GetBoundingBox();
    pt1.x = rect.x;
    pt1.y = rect.y;
    pt2.x = rect.x + rect.width;
    pt2.y = rect.y + rect.height;
    cvRectangle(&iplBGR, pt1, pt2, cvScalar(255, 255, 255, 0), 3, 8, 0);
}
//[...]
imshow("Color Image", imgBGR);
imshow("Color Tracking", imgTresh);

The “[…]” is code that shouldn’t have nothing to do with this issue, but if you need further info on how I handled the images, let me know and I’ll post it.

Based on the fact that the way I capture the image doesn’t change anything, that BGR frame and B/W image are well shown, and that after getting blobs any way of displaying them gives the same (wrong) result, the problem must be something between CBlobResult() and matrix2ipl conversion, but I don’t really know how to find it out.

Answer 1

Oh god, I spent ages to write the whole problem and the next day I found the answer almost casually. As I created the B/W matrix for tresholding, I didn’t make it single-channel; I copied the BGR matrix type, thus having a treshold image with 3 channels which resulted in a widthStep 3 times the frame width. Resolved creating cv::Mat imgTresh with CV_8UC1 as type.