Question

My problem is that I have a radar image in png format. (Sorry, but i had to remove the image as my colleague says it a copyright infringement of the German Weather Service)

I want to read the image in MATLAB. Then read all the clouds, and label each cloud with a unique index. This means that each pixel belonging to a certain cloud is labeled with the same index i. Calculate the center of area(coa) of each cloud and then I should be able to measure distances between clouds from one coa to another.

Some similar work I know was done in IDL. I tried using that but it would be much easier for me if I’m able to do all this in MATLAB and concentrate more on the result, rather then spend time learning IDL.

So, before jumping in, I want to know if all this is possible in MATLAB. If yes, can you guide me a little on how I can extract the cloud and label them?

Answer 1

First do some basic image analysis such as thresholding or median filtering and so forth, to reduce noise if relevant.
Then you can use bwlabel to label each cloud with a unique index. The use reigonprops to find the centroids.

Here’s a very basic code sample:

d=imread('u09q8.png');
bw = im2bw(d,0.1); % thereshold at 50%
bw = bwareaopen(bw, 10); % Remove objects smaller than 10 pixels from binary image
bw=bwlabel(bw); % label each cloud 
stats=regionprops(bw,'Centroid'); % find centroid coordinates of all labeled clouds