Image Analysis

How carefully you select your images and define your regions will be key to the robustness and effectiveness of your automation application. Identifying the optimal images to use early on will save you lots of time and frustration. Ideally, you should analyze and optimize your images before writing any code. Brobot has functionality that is dedicated to pre-code image analysis. It works together with the State Structure builder to give you an idea of which images may cause problems and what you may want to change.

Common issues with images and regions

Adjusting the minimum similarity of images is a common technique for situations where an image is not recognized as we expect. The image may vary slightly but still needs to be found with high certainty, in which case the minimum similarity would be lowered. Minimum similarity is also adjusted upwards, in scenarios where similar images exist on the screen, and it's important to find only the one we want. Both scenarios involve trial-and-error programming, a technique that we want to avoid when developing automation software. Ideally, we will choose images that don't require adjusting the minimum similarity at some point down the line.

Sometimes we can't choose an image that is unique. For example, we have a close button like the 'X' at the top right of a window that is the same for all windows in the environment. In this case, it is best to set the SearchRegion to look for only the button we want to press.
In addition, the close image should be defined as shared so that it is not used to find a State in the case that Brobot gets lost.

Defining regions can be difficult during execution. If we are working with images that don't always appear in the same location, we may want to identify the area where they could appear and limit our search to this area. Even if we know in advance where this area is, identifying the exact coordinates on the screen is not always easy to do and the results can be imprecise. Finding regions during execution is especially difficult when the regions contain few or no static images.

Brobot's image analysis

During the process that builds the StateStructure, an analysis of each screenshot is output to the console. This analysis contains information on GROUP_DEFINE and TRANSFER operations as well as images and their matches under the following conditions:

• at least one match is found
• an active attribute fails

Using the image analysis

Errors in the attribute operations give us valuable information about our images.

Multiple matches found

If an image should be found only once but is found multiple times in a screenshot, we know that this is either a shared image or that it should be changed or replaced. Shared images are sometimes necessary, but should include a defined SearchRegion when possible. When an image does not have an active MULTIPLE_MATCHES attribute and appears multiple times, it is initialized with the field .isShared(true). Images that are meant to be unique and appear once but are found multiple times are problems. You should check out the screenshot and try to find the matches from the coordinates given in the image analysis. If changing or replacing the image is not possible, think about either defining the image's SearchRegion to exclude the other matches or using a different strategy to achieve your goal.

Image not found

Not finding an image at all when it should be found is a sign of a poorly chosen image, or of a non-static image that is not well suited for traditional image recognition. If there is no way to use an image that is more static, you may want to change your strategy for this specific process. There are almost always multiple ways to achieve things in process automation.

Failure to define a region is usually caused by not finding an image. Finding too many matches or finding an image in the wrong place can result in an incorrectly defined region. The coordinates and size of defined regions are printed to the console along with information about images and matches.

Defining regions

Having well-defined SearchRegions will make your process flow more robust, and many regions can and should be defined before execution by the State Structure build process.

Defining regions without static images

Static images are ones that do not change their appearance. Fixed-location images are ones that do not change their location. Finding regions without static, fixed-location images is very difficult during a real run, but can be easily captured when using screenshots. Take, for example, the minimap portrayed here after this paragraph. To find the region of the minimap during a real run, I would try to find the one static and fixed-location image, the small circle in the top left with 2D written on it, and then adjust the region around this match by guessing and readjusting my guesses through trial and error. If there were no static, fixed-location images, I would try to find such images outside the minimap and adjust the region accordingly.

The attribute to use in this situation is REGION. When the filename of an image contains the String _r, it will search for the image and write a StateRegion with a pre-defined SearchRegion to the corresponding State. In order not to receive error messages in the image analysis for every other screenshot, make sure to specify the screenshot to use after the _r (i.e. _r28).

Defining regions with variable-location images

There are regions that have a variable number of images, each with variable locations. We may want to find the region that includes all of them, in order to make our searches faster and more effective. There are two ways to do this. The first is to take an image of the area you think you need and give it the TRANSFER attribute for this screenshot. The TRANSFER attribute will transfer the match to the SearchRegions of all images in the State.
Another option is to use GROUP_DEFINE, which will set the SearchRegions of each image in the group to be the union of their matches.

Defining the region of a State

Many States have one area of the screen where all the State objects can be found. It is a good idea to set this region to be the SearchRegion for all images in the State. Doing this with the StateStructure builder is easy. The attributes to use are TRANSFER or GROUP_DEFINE.