Method and system of separately identifying clumped homogeneous objects in an image

摘要

The present invention relates to an image analysis method and system for separately identifying each clumped homogeneous object in an image. The image includes at least one clump of homogeneous objects and at least one isolated homogeneous object. This image analysis method may be used in image analysis methods and systems for identifying objects in a background by generating a description, which may be either a histogram or co-occurrence matrix, of the gray level space of the image by using an entropic kernel to recursively analyze the gray level space for candidate objects and validating the presence of valid objects by comparing the candidate object attribute values to a defined set of valid object attribute values contained in a driver. The present invention includes recursive, iterative and parallel processing methods. The methods may be used in a wide variety of industrial inspection techniques, including colony counting and the identification of discrete features in carpets and of pigment elements embedded in a polymer.