Efficient 2D edge detection in Python

Question

I know that this problem has been solved before, but I've been great difficulty finding any literature describing the algorithms used to process this sort of data. I'm essentially doing some edge finding on a set of 2D data. I want to be able to find a couple points on an eye diagram (generally used to qualify high speed communications systems), and as I have had no experience with image processing I am struggling to write efficient methods.

As you can probably see, these diagrams are so called because they resemble the human eye. They can vary a great deal in the thickness, slope, and noise, depending on the signal and the system under test. The measurements that are normally taken are jitter (the horizontal thickness of the crossing region) and eye height (measured at either some specified percentage of the width or the maximum possible point). I know this can best be done with image processing instead of a more linear approach, as my attempts so far take several seconds just to find the left side of the first crossing. Any ideas of how I should go about this in Python? I'm already using NumPy to do some of the processing.

Here's some example data, it is formatted as a 1D array with associated x-axis data. For this particular example, it should be split up every 666 points (2 * int((1.0 / 2.5e9) / 1.2e-12)), since the rate of the signal was 2.5 GB/s, and the time between points was 1.2 ps.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Have you tried OpenCV (Open Computer Vision)? It's widely used and has a Python binding.

Not to be a PITA, but are you sure you wouldn't be better off with a numerical approach? All the tools I've seen for eye-diagram analysis go the numerical route; I haven't seen a single one that analyzes the image itself.

You say your algorithm is painfully slow on that dataset -- my next question would be why. Are you looking at an oversampled dataset? (I'm guessing you are.) And if so, have you tried decimating the signal first? That would at the very least give you fewer samples for your algorithm to wade through.

Answer 2

just going down your route for a moment, if you read those images into memory, as they are, wouldn't it be pretty easy to do two flood fills (starting centre and middle of left edge) that include all "white" data. if the fill routine recorded maximum and minimum height at each column, and maximum horizontal extent, then you have all you need.

in other words, i think you're over-thinking this. edge detection is used in complex "natural" scenes when the edges are unclear. here you edges are so completely obvious that you don't need to enhance them.