Operator Reference
smallest_circle (Operator)
smallest_circle
— Smallest surrounding circle of a region.
Signature
Description
The operator smallest_circle
determines the smallest
surrounding circle of a region, i.e., the circle with the smallest
area of all circles containing the region. For this circle the
center (Row
,Column
) and the radius
(Radius
) are calculated. The operator is applied when,
for example, the location and size of circular objects (e.g.,
coins) which, however, are not homogeneous inside or have broken
edges due to bad segmentation, has to be determined. The output of
the operator is selected in such a way that it can be used as input
for the operators disp_circle
and
gen_circle
.
In the documentation of this chapter (Regions / Features), you can find an image illustrating regions with varying outer and inner radii.
If several regions are passed in Regions
corresponding
tuples are returned as output parameter. In case of empty region
all parameters have the value 0.0 if no other behavior was set (see
set_system
).
Attention
Internally, the calculation is based on the center coordinates of
the region pixels. To take into account that pixels are not just
infinitely small points but have a certain area, the calculated
radius is enlarged by 0.5 before it is returned in
Radius
. This, in most cases, gives acceptable results.
However, in the worst case (pixel diagonal) this enlargement is not
sufficient. If one wants to ensure that the border of the input
region completely lies within the circle, one had to enlarge the
radius by instead of 0.5. Consequently,
the value returned in Radius
must be corrected by
. However, this would also be only
an upper bound, i.e., the circle with the corrected radius would be
slightly too big in most cases.
Execution Information
- Multithreading type: reentrant (runs in parallel with non-exclusive operators).
- Multithreading scope: global (may be called from any thread).
- Automatically parallelized on tuple level.
Parameters
Regions
(input_object) region(-array) →
object
Regions to be examined.
Row
(output_control) circle.center.y(-array) →
(real)
Line index of the center.
Column
(output_control) circle.center.x(-array) →
(real)
Column index of the center.
Radius
(output_control) circle.radius(-array) →
(real)
Radius of the surrounding circle.
Assertion:
Radius >= 0
Example (HDevelop)
read_image(Image,'fabrik') regiongrowing(Image,Regions,5,5,6,100) select_shape(Regions,SelectedRegions,'area','and',100,2000) smallest_circle(SelectedRegions,Row,Column,Radius) gen_circle(Circles,Row,Column,Radius) dev_display (Circles)
Complexity
If F is the area of the region, then the mean runtime complexity is O(sqrt(F).
Result
The operator smallest_circle
returns the value 2 (
H_MSG_TRUE)
if the input is not empty. The behavior in case of empty input (no input regions available)
is set via the operator set_system('no_object_result',<Result>)
.
The behavior in case of empty region (the region is the empty set) is set via
set_system('empty_region_result',<Result>)
.
If necessary an exception is raised.
Possible Predecessors
threshold
,
regiongrowing
,
connection
,
runlength_features
Possible Successors
Alternatives
elliptic_axis
,
smallest_rectangle1
,
smallest_rectangle2
See also
set_shape
,
select_shape
,
inner_circle
Module
Foundation