Author: Shaurya Chandhoke

Image Segmentation

Instructions for the User Running the Program

Prerequisites

Creating a Python 3 Virtual Environment

It's essential the user running the program have the following set up:

• A terminal/shell
• Python 3
• Python 3 pip
  • On Mac/Unix systems, installing Python 3 pip is as simple as sudo apt-get install python3-pip

After both are installed, it's highly recommended a python 3 virtual environment is created. To create one:

First install the virtualenv package via pip

pip3 install virtualenv

After that's installed, create a python 3 virtual environment in the root directory of this project

virtualenv venv

Once created, active the virtual environment

source venv/bin/activate

If everything went smoothly, you should see a (venv) next to your terminal command line.

Now we can proceed with installing the prerequisite pip packages.

Installing the Prerequisite Packages

Included in the submission is a special requirements.txt file specially made for pip installations. In your terminal, please run:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

It will install all the prerequisite python packages needed to run the program. You may open the file to view them.

Running the Program

A quick way to run the program with its default configuration is:

python3 image_segmentor.py <directory path>

However, I've included a way to allow the user to fine tune the program. To see all options available for the user:

python3 image_segmentor.py --help

Below is a sample on how a user might run the program given the two images for this homework are in a known directory:

python3 image_segmentor.py ./img

Sometimes, you may not want to view the output, but simply save:

python3 image_segmentor.py ./img --quiet

Other times, you may not want to save, but simply view the output:

python3 image_segmentor.py ./img --nosave

If you do not pass the --nosave flag, all images will be saved in the ./out directory

The Folder Structure of the Project

Contained within the submission should be a series of files and folders:

• /img
  • A directory containing the images to test the program from. The program will let you know if it cannot find the image file.
• /out
  • A directory the program utilizes to write it's output images to. Please do not delete this directory.
• /src
  • A directory containing the source code for the image processing. I placed the code in this directory for better readability and segmentation.
• image_segmentor.py
  • The Python file that contains the main function that will start the program. It is the file that will be run.
• requirements.txt
  • A special pip compatible package installation file that makes installation of prerequisite packages more streamlined.
• README.md
  • An instructional file meant to serve as a quick How-To for running the program.