Gizmosmith

Displaying contours in OpenCV

Suppose you have used FindContours to find the outlines of things in an image, and now want to color each one a different color, perhaps in order to create a seed map for the watershed algorithm. This gets you an image with each area that FindContours found in a different color:

#Showing the contours.
#contour_list is the output of cv.FindContours(), degapped is the image contours were found in
contour_img = cv.CreateImage(cv.GetSize(degapped), IPL_DEPTH_8U, 3)
contour = contour_list
while contour.h_next() != None:
    color = get_rand_rgb(80,255)
    holecolor = get_rand_rgb(80,255)
    cv.DrawContours(contour_img, contour, color, holecolor, -1, CV_FILLED)
    contour = contour.h_next()
show_img(contour_img, "contours " + str(iteration))

The real key here is iterating over the list of contours using h_next(), which took me longer than it should have to find.

The show_img() function is effectively just printf for OpenCV images, and looks like this:

def show_img(img, winName):
    #Debugging printf for images!
    cv.NamedWindow(winName)
    cv.ShowImage(winName, img)
    cv.WaitKey(0)
    cv.DestroyWindow(winName)

The function get_rand_rgb() gets a random RGB color with values for each color set to an integer in the range you pass it, like so:

def get_rand_rgb(min, max):
    return (random.randint(min,max),random.randint(min,max),random.randint(min,max))

I used 80,255 to get bright colors.