How to use filter

10 views (last 30 days)
Siam
Siam on 28 Aug 2014
Commented: Image Analyst on 8 Sep 2014
Hi all,
I am new to Matlab. I need to know how to use a filter to eliminate non-uniformity in an image.
  11 Comments
Siam
Siam on 7 Sep 2014
How to measure window size?
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 8 Sep 2014
Use trial and error until you get some output that you're happy with.

Sign in to comment.

Accepted Answer

Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 28 Aug 2014
Siam, you really need to understand what process gave rise to the non-uniform background. This will help you decide what algorithm to use. But there are rules of thumb. For most situations finding the background and then dividing the image by the background is the proper way to go. For certain other instances (radiology, fluorescence microscopy, etc.) background subtraction is the best way. The best way to get a background is to snap a "blank shot" of just the background with no sample(s) in there are all. If you have samples in there, you can try to get rid of them by morphology (opening or closing) or just a global fitting. Morphology can follow local variations better than regression but can introduce undesirable artifacts. What I do is to fit the image of a uniform background to a 2D polynomial and then divide - that's what works best in my situation. You can do a local regression with a Savitzky-Golay filter but I find that in most cases where you're illuminating something with a lamp, the uneven light pattern is very broad and smooth and does not vary on a rapid basis, so a process that scans the image with a small local window just ends up giving you noise. A global fit will totally and effectively remove all video noise. See my attached demo where I use John D'Errico's polyfitn (which you need to get from the File Exchange here - be sure to check out John's other useful utilities while you're there.
For color images, usually you want to convert to HSV and correct only the V channel. This will avoid color artifacts that you might get if you correct the red, green, and blue channels independently.
I also attach a Savitky-Golay filter but it just does it in each direction and is not what you'd get if you did a true 2D fit at every window location, which you can again use John's polyfitn() for if you want/need to follow background non-uniformities more closely.
  8 Comments
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 28 Aug 2014
Remove your slide with your sample on it (the cells or whatever). Just put in a totally clean slide and take a picture of the light coming through.
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 29 Aug 2014
Why do you think you need to correct for background anyway? What do you actually want to measure?

Sign in to comment.

More Answers (1)

Spandan Tiwari
Spandan Tiwari on 28 Aug 2014
The classical homomorphic filtering might be able to help here. See the following blog post on the blog Steve on Image Processing for details.
  3 Comments
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 29 Aug 2014
Yes, Basically it assumes that the really, really blurred version of the image is the background or illumination pattern.
Siam
Siam on 29 Aug 2014
Thank you for your suggestion.

Sign in to comment.

Community Treasure Hunt

Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!

Start Hunting!