Why OpenCV has no specialize data structure for region?

Question

I have been using MVTec\'s Halcon Image Processing Library for half a year and OpenCV for 1 year.

1. One thing I found that Halcon much outperforms OpenCV i

Answer 1

A common approach to represent regions is to use a Mat1i (aka a Mat of type CV_32S) that contains the indices of the regions, i.e. the labels.

You can then access the i-th region simply with: Mat1b region_mask = (labels == i);

With OpenCV < 3.0, you can use findConturs and drawContours to create the labels image:

#include <opencv2\opencv.hpp>
#include <vector>
using namespace cv;
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    // Read image from file 
    Mat1b img = imread("path_to_image", IMREAD_GRAYSCALE);

    Mat1b region;
    threshold(img, region, 200, 255, THRESH_BINARY);

    vector<vector<Point>> contours;
    findContours(region.clone(), contours, RETR_EXTERNAL, CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE);

    Mat1i labels(img.rows, img.cols, int(0));
    int n_labels = contours.size();

    for (int i = 0; i < contours.size(); ++i)
    {
        drawContours(labels, contours, i, Scalar(i + 1), CV_FILLED); // Note the +1, since 0 is the background
    }

    // Now you can get your regiones as:

    // Label "0" is the background
    for (int i = 1; i <= n_labels; ++i)
    {
        Mat1b region_mask = (labels == i);
        imshow("Region", region_mask);
        waitKey();
    }

    return 0;
}

With OpenCV >= 3.0 you can use connectedComponents, which will directly return the labels:

#include <opencv2\opencv.hpp>
#include <vector>
using namespace cv;
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    // Read image from file 
    Mat1b img = imread("path_to_image", IMREAD_GRAYSCALE);

    Mat1b region;
    threshold(img, region, 200, 255, THRESH_BINARY);

    Mat1i labels;
    int n_labels = connectedComponents(region, labels);

    // Now you can get your regiones as:

    // Label "0" is the background
    for (int i = 1; i <= n_labels; ++i)
    {
        Mat1b region_mask = (labels == i);
        imshow("Region", region_mask);
        waitKey();
    }

    return 0;
}