I am looking for the coordinates of connected blobs in a binary image (2d numpy array of 0 or 1).
The skimage library provides a very fast way to label blobs within the array (which I found from similar SO posts). However I want a list of the coordinates of the blob, not a labelled array. I have a solution which extracts the coordinates from the labelled image. But it is very slow. Far slower than the inital labelling.
Minimal Reproducible example:
import timeit
from skimage import measure
import numpy as np
binary_image = np.array([
[0,1,0,0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0,1],
[0,1,0,1,1,1,0,1,1,1,0,1],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0],
[0,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0],
[0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
[0,1,0,0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0,1],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0],
[0,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0],
])
print(f"\n\n2d array of type: {type(binary_image)}:")
print(binary_image)
labels = measure.label(binary_image)
print(f"\n\n2d array with connected blobs labelled of type {type(labels)}:")
print(labels)
def extract_blobs_from_labelled_array(labelled_array):
# The goal is to obtain lists of the coordinates
# Of each distinct blob.
blobs = []
label = 1
while True:
indices_of_label = np.where(labelled_array==label)
if not indices_of_label[0].size > 0:
break
else:
blob =list(zip(*indices_of_label))
label+=1
blobs.append(blob)
if __name__ == "__main__":
print("\n\nBeginning extract_blobs_from_labelled_array timing\n")
print("Time taken:")
print(
timeit.timeit(
'extract_blobs_from_labelled_array(labels)',
globals=globals(),
number=1
)
)
print("\n\n")
Output:
2d array of type: <class 'numpy.ndarray'>:
[[0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1]
[0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0]
[0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0]
[0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0]
[0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0]
[0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0]]
2d array with connected blobs labelled of type <class 'numpy.ndarray'>:
[[ 0 1 0 0 2 2 0 3 3 0 0 4]
[ 0 1 0 2 2 2 0 3 3 3 0 4]
[ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 3 3 0 0]
[ 0 5 5 5 5 0 0 0 0 3 0 0]
[ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 3 3 0 0]
[ 0 0 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0]
[ 0 6 0 0 7 7 0 8 8 0 0 9]
[ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8 8 8 0 0]
[ 0 10 10 10 10 0 0 0 0 8 0 0]]
Beginning extract_blobs_from_labelled_array timing
Time taken:
9.346099977847189e-05
9e-05 is small but so is this image for the example. In reality I am working with very high resolution images for which the function takes approximately 10 minutes.
Is there a faster way to do this?
Side note: I'm only using list(zip())
to try get the numpy coordinates into something I'm used to (I don't use numpy much just Python). Should I be skipping this and just using the coordinates to index as-is? Will that speed it up?
The part of the code that slow is here:
while True:
indices_of_label = np.where(labelled_array==label)
if not indices_of_label[0].size > 0:
break
else:
blob =list(zip(*indices_of_label))
label+=1
blobs.append(blob)
First, a complete aside: you should avoid using while True
when you know the number of elements you will be iterating over. It's a recipe for hard-to-find infinite-loop bugs.
Instead, you should use:
for label in range(np.max(labels)):
and then you can ignore the if ...: break
.
A second issue is indeed that you are using list(zip(*))
, which is slow compared to NumPy functions. Here you could get approximately the same result with np.transpose(indices_of_label)
, which will get you a 2D array of shape (n_coords, n_dim)
, ie (n_coords, 2)
.
But the Big Issue is the expression labelled_array == label
. This will examine every pixel of the image once for every label. (Twice, actually, because then you run np.where()
, which takes another pass.) This is a lot of unnecessary work, as the coordinates can be found in one pass.
The scikit-image function skimage.measure.regionprops
can do this for you. regionprops
goes over the image once and returns a list containing one RegionProps
object per label. The object has a .coords
attribute containing the coordinates of each pixel in the blob. So, here's your code, modified to use that function:
import timeit
from skimage import measure
import numpy as np
binary_image = np.array([
[0,1,0,0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0,1],
[0,1,0,1,1,1,0,1,1,1,0,1],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0],
[0,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0],
[0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
[0,1,0,0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0,1],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0],
[0,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0],
])
print(f"\n\n2d array of type: {type(binary_image)}:")
print(binary_image)
labels = measure.label(binary_image)
print(f"\n\n2d array with connected blobs labelled of type {type(labels)}:")
print(labels)
def extract_blobs_from_labelled_array(labelled_array):
"""Return a list containing coordinates of pixels in each blob."""
props = measure.regionprops(labelled_array)
blobs = [p.coords for p in props]
return blobs
if __name__ == "__main__":
print("\n\nBeginning extract_blobs_from_labelled_array timing\n")
print("Time taken:")
print(
timeit.timeit(
'extract_blobs_from_labelled_array(labels)',
globals=globals(),
number=1
)
)
print("\n\n")