The repository contains an implementation of the rotlinedet algorithm in C++ optimized for GPU using OpenACC. The algorithm finds lines in the given image by rotating it by many angles and finding drastic changes in intensity of its columns.

Use cmake to compile.

Use g++ to compile for CPU.

Use nvc++ to compile for GPU for significant speed up. Install NVIDIA HPC SDK.

Run rotlinedet_run executable after compilation. The image is read from the standard input so that images can be pipelined to this program real-time without saving them to a disk.

The output is printed to standard output. Each line in the image (a laser candidate) is represented by two points on the image in the following format {x1},{y1},{x2},{y2}\n.

The program supports the following arguments:

• --filterSize The width of the running average window. A typical width is around 30. The best value depends on the image resolution and laser line width.
• --slopeThreshold Only spikes at local extremes are considered (slope == 0). However, the slope is not precisely 0 but usually very close to 0. A typical threshold is 0.1 or 0.2.
• --minPixelsThreshold The minimum number of pixels in a column that can be considered statistically significant to say that there is a spike in that column. Columns with lower number of pixels than this threshold are ignored. A typical value is 200 or 300.
• --pixelCountFile File path to a file with saved pixel counts in columns of a rotated image. Generation of this file is discussed further.
• --candidates Number of candidate lines the program should produce.

Optimal parameters can be determined using bestparams.py script in apaler repository.

The image is read from the standard input:

python3 loadimg.py ./data/olympus/_6210070_fullhd.JPG | ./src/rotlinedet_run --filterSize 30 --slopeThreshold 0.2 --minPixelsThreshold 300 --candidates 5

The candidates are written to the standard output:

0,804,1107,0
22,0,1101,1079
1919,580,1497,0
1884,0,805,1079
0,831,507,1079

The number of rotations is a significant parameter, which determines the precision of the algorithm. More rotations means smaller rotational difference, thus higher precision. Increasing the number of rotations linearly increases the processing time. It is advisory to keep this parameter as small as possible while achieving sufficient accuracy.

The following steps must be made to change the number of rotations:

• Change parameters (ANGLE_RADS_FROM, ANGLE_RADS_TO, ANGLE_STEP) in src/scripts/rotations.py
• Regenerate the src/scripts/columnPixelCounts.datfile by running the src/scripts/rotations.py script
• Copy generated array from stdout to linedet.cpp
• Change the NUM_ROTATIONS in linedet.hpp and compile the source code

Speed was evaluated on Full HD and 4K image. Only the most computationally intensive part of the algorithm—the sumColumns function—was evaluated. The other parts of the algorithm are too insignificant to consider for optimization.

Evaluation used 180 rotations. Note that the current implementation uses 281 rotations. The speed scales linearly with the increasing number of rotations.

1920x1080 - Full HD
g++ 1950 ms
g++ -O3 600 ms
GPU 440 ms

3840x2160 - 4K
g++ 7900 ms
g++ -O3 2390 ms
GPU 895 ms

The algorithm can be evaluated using the evaluate.py script in apaler repository. The evaluation produced 143/250 successful detections (57.2%). The script produces statistics per intensity, per laser width, per laser length, and per image.

An important finding emerged from per image statistics:

image
0   1  2  3 4
10 40 17 37 3

The first row shows image index and below that index on the second line is the number of failed detections out of 50. Detection accuracies for these images are then 80%, 20%, 66%, 26% and 94%.

The finding is that for some background the algorithm works better than for other background. After careful exploration of the images, it is clear that the detection accuracy depends on the complexity of the image background (or rather foreground). If there are trees whose peaks cover part of the lighter background, then the intensities of the columns are jagged. Possible solution: image could be divided into quadrants in which the line would be detected separately.

• 317 rotations result in a step of a half a degree.
• Increasing number of rotations from 317 to 475 did not improve accuracy.

Tests are written using the GoogleTest library. The library should be downloaded into google_tests/lib directory.

• Modify the algorithm to accept a continuous stream of images instead of a single image (no memory allocations will be required for the processing of each image)
• Strong single point light sources may cause drastic changes in intensity. Thus, consider incorporating replacement of extreme values (too far away from median) with the median.