Some Practical Assignments in Computer
Vision
Yolanda GONZALEZ
Departamento de Matemáticas e Informática
Universidad de las Islas Baleares
E-07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Tel: (34) 971 172969. Fax: (34) 971 173003
E-mail: y.gonzalez@uib.es jairo@uib.es
Abstract. Some practical assignments using MatLab
and OpenCV and experiences while teaching computer
vision courses in undergraduate and graduate programs
are presented.
1 INTRODUCTION
With the arrival of fast computers and good com-
puter vision libraries, students have the possibility of
building complex vision systems in a short time. Mat-
Lab and OpenCV are some of these libraries that in-
clude powerful routines that, before they existed, stu-
dents needed one semester to implement. We present
some practical assignment examples used in undergrad-
uate and graduate courses, and some other experiences
while teaching in different programs and levels.
The teaching of computer vision is now recognized
worldwide as important in several engineering pro-
grams to the point that some suggest the creation of
a computer vision science program [1]. Readers are
directed to a great review of computer vision texts
done by B. Maxwell [6]. With this paper we would
like to share our experiences while teaching computer
vision courses in the Industrial Engineering undergrad-
uate program and in the Computer Science graduate
program at the Balearic Islands University. We will
concentrate on the practical assignments.
The paper is organized as follows. Section shows
the advantages of using Matlab as lab tool with under-
graduate industrial engineering students while Section
2.3.3 describes how graduate computer science students
use OpenCV with ease to resolve practical problems.
Section 3.2 gives the conclusions.
2 MATLAB PRACTICAL ASIGNMENTS
This section presents some practical assignments for
an undergraduate image processing course. During
four months the course tackles the low-level image anal-
ysis methods, including image formation, edge detec-
tion, feature detection, and segmentation.
The course has both a lecture component and a lab
component. Both meet for four hours a week. For the
Jairo ROCHA
lab component, students use Matlab and the Image
Processing Toolbox [3].
Matlab stands for MATrix LABoratory and the soft-
ware is built up around vectors and matrices and it is
a high-performance technical computing and visualiza-
tion environment making it ideal for image processing.
It is available for AIX, Digital UNIX,HP-UX 10, HP-
UX 11, IRIX/IRIX64, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and
Windows and it is commercialized by The Mathworks
[5], founded in 1984. Since then it is widely used in all
areas of applied mathematics in education and research
at universities and in the industry.
Matlab combines comprehensive math and graphics
functions with a powerful high-level language. In addi-
tion, to integrate external routines written in C, C++,
Fortran, and Java with Matlab applications is possible.
The add-on tools extend the power of Matlab. In
particular, the Image Processing Toolbox is especially
useful for practical image processing and computer vi-
sion courses.
Matlab was choosen for use in the lab because it is
an interactive environment with lots of demos and help
topics and students can get immediate visual reinforce-
ment of classroom lectures and concepts. Moreover,
Matlab’s language has proven to be easy for students to
understand providing them easy access to sophisticated
algorithms and image processing implementations.
Lab assignments are divided in three main groups:
understanding basic concepts, developing low-level al-
gorithms and resolving high-level problems.
2.1 Understanding basic concepts
The main objective of this set of assignments is that
the student understand the classroom concepts using
Matlab Image Processing Toolbox.
2.1.1 Examples
Image Manipulation. Read, write, view images
and conversion between different formats.
Main Matlab functions: imread, imwrite,
 gray2ind, ind2gray, ind2rgb, mat2gray, correct thresholds allows dice to be identified quickly.
rgb2gray, rgb2ind. Within the dice regions, the number of dots is counted.
Students usually do not have problems with this first
Spacial Transformations. Convolution and assignment.
correlation. Figure 1 shows the original color image on the left
Main Matlab functions: imfilter, conv2, and the black and white dots identified on the right.
filter2. Figure 2 shows the processed binary images with the
Frequency Transformations. Fourier dice found.
transform.
Main Matlab functions: fft2, ifft2,
fftshift.
Histogram Modification. Explore histogram as
an enhancement technique.
Main Matlab functions: imhist, histeq,
imadjust.
Filtering. Noise identification and filtering
techniques to remove it. Figure 1: Dice identification: Original color image (left)
Main Matlab functions: imnoise, and processed image with value identified marked with red
medfilt2, ordfilt2, wiener2. crosses (right).

Morphological Transformations. Dilatation

and erosion as fundamental morphological
operations.
Main Matlab functions: imdilate,
imerode, imclose, imopen, bwmorph.
Segmentation using Edge Detection. Detection
of boundaries between two regions using
different gradient aproximations.
Main Matlab function: edge.
Segmentation using Thresholding. Divide Figure 2: Dice identification: White dice (left) and Black
the image in regions depending on the die (right).
graylevel.
Main Matlab function: im2bw.
2.3.2 Identify the maximum number of wood
2.2 Developing low-level algorithms pieces using edge detection

Once the student have understood the main concepts
he would be qualified to develop in MatLab some of the
algorithms tested previously with the matlab functions.
This block of assignments set out the development
of some of the low-level image processing algorithms.
The student has to prove that the result is the same
using his own algorithm and the MatLab function.
2.3 Resolving high-level problems
This set of assignments has the purpose of summarizing
all the concepts tackled in the course. The student has
to resolve a problem that involves more than one tech-
nique and he has to choose the right way to accomplish
it. Next, three examples are shown.
2.3.1 Identify the number of black and white
dice and their value
With this assignment the student must apply threshold
techniques. It is an easy example where selecting the
In this assignment students have to work with differ-
ent edge detection algorithms to select the correct one.
First of all, an enhancement of the image have to be
done.
The students usually have problems with the shad-
ows and the illumination.
Figure 3 shows the original color image on the left
and the equalized result on the right. Figure 4 shows
a student contribution.
2.3.3 Identify the number of domino and their
value
This is the most complex assignment. Filtering, en-
hancement and threshold techniques have to be used.
Figure 5 shows on the left side the noisy salt and
pepper image where domino and their value have to
be identified. Moreover one die and chess counters are
present. On the right side the filtered image is shown.
Students usually have to prove more than one way
to achieve the correct solution. Figure 6 shows it.
Figure 3: Wood pieces detection: original color image (left) Figure 5: Domino identification: Noise original image
and its enhancement (right). (left) and corrected image (right).

Figure 4: Wood pieces detection: edge detection (left) and Figure 6: Domino identification: domino (left) and domino
pieces detected (right). value (right).

3 OPENCV PRACTICAL ASIGNMENTS ternatives for the thresholds used. This is the most
important advantage of OpenCV: It implements com-
The OpenCV library [4] is a tool-box of 500 imaging plex procedures so that the programmer devotes most
and computer vision functions and applications, avail- of its time to witness the difficulties of tuning a method
able for Windows and Linux operating systems, and is for a particular setting, and the result is the possibility
free for commercial and academic use. to solve a more complex task.
Like with all libraries, students should study the
OpenCV library for a while before starting to write
programs. They must be familiar with basic image 3.2 Hand tracking in a movie
types and image methods and operations before they
This assignment deals with the problem of tracking
can make profit of the powerful routines of OpenCV.
the user hand with a camera so that the 2D position,
The system includes very good programming demon-
orientation and width are known in each frame.
strations that make the student save considerable time,
assuming that the students are good C++ program- The algorithm should use the color distribution of
mers. the hand that is seen at the beginning of the sequence
In the following examples we present briefly several (the user puts its hand inside a fixed square on the
practical assignments that were successfully used in a window).
graduate computer vision class. Using the function CvCamShift(), the problem is
easy to solve. In this function, the hue (in the HSV
3.1 Point tracking in a movie color model) distribution on a fix square of the initial
The assignment consists of two parts: First, finding frames of the sequence, where the user fixes his hand at
points easy to track in a frame and second, matching the beginning, is stored in a 1D histogram. Hue is very
them in the next frame. The result is a set of point stable through brightness changes, and even through
correspondences from frame to frame. different people races. The other color channels are
Both parts are easy to carry out using particular ignored, except that pixels where the brightness is too
functions of the library, CvGoodFeaturesToTrack() low or too high are ignored, and also pixels where the
and CvCalcOpticalFlowPyrLK(). Figure 7 shows the saturation is too low, because the hue values are not
points found by the first procedure in a frame and then stable. The color distribution is used to calculate the
the results of the matching procedure in the consecu- probability that each pixel in each frame belongs to the
tive frame. The first procedure finds corners using the region tracked.
eigenvalues of a matrix of gray level derivatives. The Tracking is carried out by an iterative procedure that
second procedure implements the Lucas and Kanade finds the window that has the best similar probability
algorithm in its hierarchical version. distribution with respect to the stored distribution. In-
Students spend most of the time finding the correct side the window, the principal axes are calculated to
parameters to call the functions and trying several al- find the main orientation and extension in each direc-

Figure 7: Feature tracking: “good” features (left) and
matching points in the consecutive frame (right).
Figure 8: Hand tracking: user fix its hand under the square
(left), pixels with the same hue distribution (center) and
cross showing the tracked hand (right) in three different
frames of the same sequence.
tion.
Students can build easily a tracking system using this [4] Intel. http://www.intel.com/research/mrl/
library routine that tracks patches of color, and they
can understand the importance of the color channels [5] Mathworks. http://www.mathworks.com. 2003.
used and their approximate perceptual meanings. In
Figure 8 we can see the original square under which the [6] B. Maxwell. A survey of computer vision educa-
user puts its hand, the pixels in a subsequent frame
that have a color distribution similar to the original
one, and the tracking results in another frame. The
position, orientation and size of the cross with respect
to the original one can be used to control an interactive
application.
has the advantage of being free software useful for good
C++ programmers so that it is more appropriate for
advanced computer vision courses.
Other interesting library that we explore in this year
graduate class is Megawave [2] developed at the Centre
de Mathématiques et de Leurs Applications (CMLA),
Paris. We recommend it for teaching level sets.
Acknowledgements. We thank Javier Antich and
Silvia Campins for some of the images. This works
is partially supported by the Spanish grant CICYT
DPI2001-2311-C03-02 and FEDER funding.
References
[1] G. Bebis, D. Egbert, and M. Shah. Review of com-
puter vision education. IEEE Trans. on Education,
46(1):2–21, 2003.
[2] CMLA. http://www.cachan.ens-cachan.fr/
cmla/megawave. 2003.
[3] S. Eddins and M. Orchard. Using matlab and c in
an image processing lab course. IEEE Proceedings
of 1st International Conference on Image Process-
ing, pages 515–519, 1994.
research/opencv. 2003.
tion and text resources. Int. Journal of Pattern
Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, 15(5):757–
773, 2001.

4 CONCLUSION

Undergraduate and graduate computer vision

courses can have very different results according to stu-
dents’ individual motivations. Some students finish the
assignments and explore extensions while others dis-
cover that it is a subject that they do not like and
never quite finish them. The high level libraries now
available allow students to reach quicker the difficul-
ties that the subject tackles nowadays so they can get
interested (or not) having more realistic experiences.
Students on practical assignments realize how diffi-
cult is to build general robust systems and the impor-
tance of controling the capture conditions. However,
the lack of programming skills of undergraduate indus-
trial engineering students make it difficult for them to
create real systems.
Matlab and OpenCV seem to be suitable lab tools in
computer vision teaching. Matlab is better for image
processing courses of undergraduate programs because
of its interactive environment and the no need of solid
programming knowledge. On the other hand, OpenCV