Is there a better way to remove parts with consecutive zeros that have length equal or above threshold?

Question

Problem statement:

As stated by the title, I want to remove parts from an 1D array that have consecutive zeros and length equal or above a threshold.

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My solution:

I produced the solution shown in the following MRE:

import numpy as np

THRESHOLD = 4

a = np.array((1,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1))

print("Input: " + str(a))

# Find the indices of the parts that meet threshold requirement
gaps_above_threshold_inds = np.where(np.diff(np.nonzero(a)[0]) - 1 >= THRESHOLD)[0]

# Delete these parts from array
for idx in gaps_above_threshold_inds:
    a = np.delete(a, list(range(np.nonzero(a)[0][idx] + 1, np.nonzero(a)[0][idx + 1])))
    
print("Output: " + str(a))

Output:

Input:  [1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1]
Output: [1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1]

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Question:

Is there a less complicated and more efficient way to do this on a numpy array?

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Edit:

Based on @mozway comments, I'm editing my question providing some more information.

Basically, the problem domain is:

• I have 1D signals of length ~20.000 samples
• Some parts of the signals have been zeroed due to noise
• The rest of the signal has non-zero values, in the range ~[50, 250]
• Leading and trailing zeros have been removed

My goal is to remove the zero parts above a length threshold as I have already said.

More detailed questions:

• As far as numpy efficient handling is concerned, is there a better solution from the one above?
• As far as efficient signal processing techniques are concerned, is there more suitable way to achieve the desired goal than using numpy?

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Comments on answers:

Regarding my first concern about efficient numpy handling, @mathfux's solution is really great and basically what I was looking for. That's why I accepted this one.

However, the approach by @Jérôme Richard answers my second question and it presents a really high performance solution; really useful if the dataset is extremely big.

Thanks for your great answers!

Answer 1

np.delete create a new array every time it is called which is very inefficient. A faster solution is to store all the value to keep in a mask/boolean array and then filter the input array at once. However, this will still likely require a pure-Python loop if done only with Numpy. A simpler and faster solution is to use Numba (or Cython) to do that. Here is an implementation:

import numpy as np
import numba as nb

@nb.njit('int_[:](int_[:], int_)')
def filterZeros(arr, threshold):
    n = len(arr)
    res = np.empty(n, dtype=arr.dtype)
    count = 0
    j = 0
    for i in range(n):
        if arr[i] == 0:
            count += 1
        else:
            if count >= threshold:
                j -= count
            count = 0
        res[j] = arr[i]
        j += 1
    if n > 0 and arr[n-1] == 0 and count >= threshold:
        j -= count
    return res[0:j]

a = np.array((1,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1))
a = filterZeros(a, 4)
print("Output: " + str(a))

Here are the result with a random binary array containing 100_000 items on my machine:

Reference implementation: 5982    ms
Mozway's solution:          23.4  ms
This implementation:         0.11 ms

Thus, the solution is about 54381 faster than the initial solution and 212 times faster than the one of Mozway. The code can even be ~30% faster by working in-place (destroy the input array) and by telling Numba the array is contiguous in memory (using ::1 instead of :).

Answer 2

It's also possible to find differences of nonzero items, fix the ones that exceeed threshold and reconstruct a sequence in a correct way.

def numpy_fix(a):
    # STEP 1. find indices of nonzero items: [0 1 3 8 9 13 19]
    idx = np.flatnonzero(a)
    # STEP 2. Find differences along these indices (also insert a leading zero): [0 1 2 5 1 4 6] 
    df = np.diff(idx, prepend=0)
    # STEP 3. Fix differences of indices larger than THRESHOLD: [0 1 2 1 1 4 1] 
    df[df>THRESHOLD] = 1
    # STEP 4. Given differences on indices, reconstruct indices themselves: [0 1 3 4 5 9 10]
    cs = np.cumsum(df)
    z = np.zeros(cs[-1]+1, dtype=int) # create a list of zeros
    z[cs] = 1 #pad it with ones within indices found
    return z
>>> numpy_fix(a)
array([1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1])

(Note that it's correct only if a has no leading or trailing zeros)

%timeit numpy_fix(np.tile(a, (1, 50000)))
39.3 ms ± 865 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10 loops each)