centroid of contour/object in opencv in c?

Question

is there some good and better way to find centroid of contour in opencv, without using built in functions? <

Answer 1

What you get in your current piece of code is of course the centroid of your bounding box.

"If you have a bunch of points(2d vectors), you should be able to get the centroid by averaging those points: create a point to add all the other points' positions into and then divide the components of that point with accumulated positions by the total number of points." - George Profenza mentions

This is indeed the right approach for the exact centroid of any given object in two-dimentionalspace.

On wikipedia we have some general forms for finding the centroid of an object. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centroid

Personally, I would ask myself what I needed from this program. Do I want a thorough but performance heavy operation, or do I want to make some approximations? I might even be able to find an OpenCV function that deals with this correct and efficiently.

Don't have a working example, so I'm writing this in pseudocode on a simple 5 pixel example on a thorough method.

x_centroid = (pixel1_x + pixel2_x + pixel3_x + pixel4_x +pixel5_x)/5
y_centroid = (pixel1_y + pixel2_y + pixel3_y + pixel4_y +pixel5_y)/5

centroidPoint(x_centroid, y_centroid)

Looped for x pixels

Loop j times *sample (for (int i=0, i < j, i++))*
{
    x_centroid = pixel[j]_x + x_centroid
    y_centroid = pixel[j]_x + x_centroid
}
x_centroid = x_centroid/j
y_centroid = y_centroid/j

centroidPoint(x_centroid, y_centroid)

Essentially, you have the vector contours of the type

vector>

in OpenCV 2.3. I believe you have something similar in earlier versions, and you should be able to go through each blob on your picture with the first index of this "double vector", and go through each pixel in the inner vector.

Here is a link to documentation on the contour function http://opencv.itseez.com/modules/imgproc/doc/structural_analysis_and_shape_descriptors.html?highlight=contours#cv.DrawContours

note: you've tagged your question as c++ visual. I'd suggest that you use the c++ syntax in OpenCV 2.3 instead of c. The first and good reason to use 2.3 is that it is more class based, which in this case means that the class Mat (instead of IplImage) does leak memory. One does not have to write destroy commands all the live long day :)

I hope this shed some light on your problem. Enjoy.