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Cover image for GPU Accelerated Contour Detection on PiCamera
Junxiao Shi
Junxiao Shi

Posted on • Originally published at yoursunny.com

GPU Accelerated Contour Detection on PiCamera

This post is originally published on yoursunny.com blog https://yoursunny.com/t/2018/contour-PiCamera/

Earlier this month, I spent a week building OpenCV 3.2.0, with the intention to reproduce the contour detection demo I witnessed at MoCoMakers meetup.
I successfully made contour detection working on PiCamera through MJPEG streaming.
P.S. Can you tell the Hack Arizona 2016 shirt?

contour on PiCamera

How MocoMakers's Demo Works

def makeContour(image):
    gray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
    gray = cv2.GaussianBlur(gray, (3, 3), 0)
    edged = auto_canny(gray)

def auto_canny(image, sigma=0.33):
    v = np.median(image)
    lower = int(max(0, (1.0 - sigma) * v))
    upper = int(min(255, (1.0 + sigma) * v))
    edged = cv2.Canny(image, lower, upper)
    return edged
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Their code works with a MJPEG stream from an Android phone.
It extracts a JPEG frame from the video stream, processes the image through makeContour function, and displays the result.
The makeContour function converts the RGB image to grayscale, blurs the grayscale image, and runs the Canny Edge Detection algorithm.

A Naive Translation

I want to have contour effect on my NoIR Camera Module, instead of an MJPEG stream from another device.
PiCamera is the official Python library to work with Raspberry Pi cameras, and it can capture still images and videos in various formats.
There is even an example of capturing a picture to an OpenCV object.

It was straightforward to stitch the code together.
This code initializes the camera, captures image frames, and processes them with the same logic as makeContour and auto_canny.
Since my Raspberry Pi Zero W isn't connected to a monitor, instead of displaying locally, I'm streaming the output as MJPEG over HTTP to another computer.

def handleContourMjpeg(self):
    import cv2
    import numpy as np
    width, height, blur, sigma = 640, 480, 2, 0.33
    self.mjpegBegin()
    with PiCamera() as camera:
        camera.resolution = (width, height)
        bgr = np.empty((int(width * height * 3),), dtype=np.uint8)
        for x in camera.capture_continuous(bgr, format='bgr'):
            image = bgr.reshape((height, width, 3))
            image = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
            image = cv2.GaussianBlur(image, (3, 3), 0)
            v = np.median(image)
            lower = int(max(0, (1.0 - sigma) * v))
            upper = int(min(255, (1.0 + sigma) * v))
            image = cv2.Canny(image, lower, upper)
            self.wfile.write(cv2.imencode('.jpg', image)[1])
            self.mjpegEndFrame()
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I did see the cool contour effect of my muscular body, but the frame rate was low: I got only 1.6 Frames Per Second (FPS).
1.6 FPS is not a satisfying experience, so I started optimizing the code.

Optimizing the Code: Video Port

camera.capture_continuous by default captures still images using the "image port" of the Pi camera.
For rapid capturing, I added use_video_port=True argument to this function invocation.
It asks the camera to capture a still image via the "video port", which should enable higher FPS at the expense of lower picture quality.

The performance improved to 2.6 FPS after this change.

Optimizing the Code: YUV

The first step of makeContour is converting the "bgr"-format image to grayscale.
"bgr" stands for "blue-green-red", which is one of the output formats supported by PiCamera.
Can I eliminate this step, and have PiCamera provide a grayscale image directly?

I looked through the list of supported formats, but did not find a grayscale format.
However, there is a "yuv" format, where Y stands for "luminance" or "brightness".
On the other hand, a grayscale image can be the result of measuring the intensity of light at each pixel.
Bingo!
I just need to extract the "Y" component of a YUV image, and get a grayscale image.

Where's the "Y" component?
PiCamera docs give a detailed description: for a 640x480 image, first 640x480 bytes of the array would be "Y", followed by 640x480/4 bytes of "U" and 640x480/4 bytes of "V".
Therefore, I can extract "Y" component into image variable like this:

yuv = np.empty((int(width * height * 1.5),), dtype=np.uint8)
for x in camera.capture_continuous(yuv, format='yuv', use_video_port=True):
    image = yuv[:width*height].reshape((height, width))
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This change brought the most significant performance improvement: the contour camera is running at 4.7 FPS.

Optimizing the Code: Blurring in GPU

The second step of makeContour is a Gaussian blur filter.
Luckily, PiCamera gives a way to do this in the GPU:

camera.video_denoise = False
camera.image_effect = 'blur'
camera.image_effect_params = (2,)
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Although the GPU's blurring effect is not exactly same as cv2.GaussianBlur, the contour still looks awesome.
The performance reached 4.9 FPS (for the same scene as other tests that is more complex than the screenshot at the beginning of this article).

The Complete Code

#!/usr/bin/python3
import time
from http.server import HTTPServer, BaseHTTPRequestHandler
from picamera import PiCamera


class MjpegMixin:
    """
    Add MJPEG features to a subclass of BaseHTTPRequestHandler.
    """

    mjpegBound = 'eb4154aac1c9ee636b8a6f5622176d1fbc08d382ee161bbd42e8483808c684b6'
    frameBegin = 'Content-Type: image/jpeg\n\n'.encode('ascii')
    frameBound = ('\n--' + mjpegBound + '\n').encode('ascii') + frameBegin

    def mjpegBegin(self):
        self.send_response(200)
        self.send_header('Content-Type',
                         'multipart/x-mixed-replace;boundary=' + MjpegMixin.mjpegBound)
        self.end_headers()
        self.wfile.write(MjpegMixin.frameBegin)

    def mjpegEndFrame(self):
        self.wfile.write(MjpegMixin.frameBound)


class SmoothedFpsCalculator:
    """
    Provide smoothed frame per second calculation.
    """

    def __init__(self, alpha=0.1):
        self.t = time.time()
        self.alpha = alpha
        self.sfps = None

    def __call__(self):
        t = time.time()
        d = t - self.t
        self.t = t
        fps = 1.0 / d
        if self.sfps is None:
            self.sfps = fps
        else:
            self.sfps = fps * self.alpha + self.sfps * (1.0 - self.alpha)
        return self.sfps


class Handler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler, MjpegMixin):
    def do_GET(self):
        if self.path == '/contour.mjpeg':
            self.handleContourMjpeg()
        else:
            self.send_response(404)
            self.end_headers()

    def handleContourMjpeg(self):
        import cv2
        import numpy as np
        width, height, blur, sigma = 640, 480, 2, 0.33
        fpsFont, fpsXY = cv2.FONT_HERSHEY_SIMPLEX, (0, height-1)
        self.mjpegBegin()
        with PiCamera() as camera:
            camera.resolution = (width, height)
            camera.video_denoise = False
            camera.image_effect = 'blur'
            camera.image_effect_params = (blur,)
            yuv = np.empty((int(width * height * 1.5),), dtype=np.uint8)
            sfps = SmoothedFpsCalculator()
            for x in camera.capture_continuous(yuv, format='yuv', use_video_port=True):
                image = yuv[:width*height].reshape((height, width))
                v = np.median(image)
                lower = int(max(0, (1.0 - sigma) * v))
                upper = int(min(255, (1.0 + sigma) * v))
                image = cv2.Canny(image, lower, upper)
                cv2.putText(image, '%0.2f fps' %
                            sfps(), fpsXY, fpsFont, 1.0, 255)
                self.wfile.write(cv2.imencode('.jpg', image)[1])
                self.mjpegEndFrame()


def run(port=8000):
    httpd = HTTPServer(('', port), Handler)
    httpd.serve_forever()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    import argparse
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='HTTP streaming camera.')
    parser.add_argument('--port', type=int, default=8000,
                        help='listening port number')
    args = parser.parse_args()
    run(port=args.port)
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