只是想告诉你们，有一个很好的选项可以用python在图像中找到局部最大值:

from skimage.feature import peak_local_max

或者对于skimage 0.8.0:

from skimage.feature.peak import peak_local_max

http://scikit-image.org/docs/0.8.0/api/skimage.feature.peak.html

我用局部最大滤波器检测了峰值。下面是你的第一个4个爪子数据集的结果:

我还在9个爪子的第二个数据集上运行了它，效果也很好。

你可以这样做:

import numpy as np
from scipy.ndimage.filters import maximum_filter
from scipy.ndimage.morphology import generate_binary_structure, binary_erosion
import matplotlib.pyplot as pp

#for some reason I had to reshape. Numpy ignored the shape header.
paws_data = np.loadtxt("paws.txt").reshape(4,11,14)

#getting a list of images
paws = [p.squeeze() for p in np.vsplit(paws_data,4)]


def detect_peaks(image):
    """
    Takes an image and detect the peaks usingthe local maximum filter.
    Returns a boolean mask of the peaks (i.e. 1 when
    the pixel's value is the neighborhood maximum, 0 otherwise)
    """

    # define an 8-connected neighborhood
    neighborhood = generate_binary_structure(2,2)

    #apply the local maximum filter; all pixel of maximal value 
    #in their neighborhood are set to 1
    local_max = maximum_filter(image, footprint=neighborhood)==image
    #local_max is a mask that contains the peaks we are 
    #looking for, but also the background.
    #In order to isolate the peaks we must remove the background from the mask.

    #we create the mask of the background
    background = (image==0)

    #a little technicality: we must erode the background in order to 
    #successfully subtract it form local_max, otherwise a line will 
    #appear along the background border (artifact of the local maximum filter)
    eroded_background = binary_erosion(background, structure=neighborhood, border_value=1)

    #we obtain the final mask, containing only peaks, 
    #by removing the background from the local_max mask (xor operation)
    detected_peaks = local_max ^ eroded_background

    return detected_peaks


#applying the detection and plotting results
for i, paw in enumerate(paws):
    detected_peaks = detect_peaks(paw)
    pp.subplot(4,2,(2*i+1))
    pp.imshow(paw)
    pp.subplot(4,2,(2*i+2) )
    pp.imshow(detected_peaks)

pp.show()

之后你所需要做的就是在蒙版上使用scipy. nmage .measurements.label来标记所有不同的对象。然后你就可以单独和他们玩了。

注意，该方法工作得很好，因为背景没有噪声。如果是的话，你会在背景中检测到一堆其他不想要的峰。另一个重要因素是社区的大小。如果峰值大小发生变化，您将需要调整它(应该保持大致成比例)。

我相信你现在已经有足够的信息了，但我忍不住建议使用k-均值聚类方法。k-means是一种无监督聚类算法，它将你的数据(在任何维度上-我碰巧在3D中这样做)，并将其排列成k个具有明显边界的聚类。这里很好，因为你确切地知道这些犬齿应该有多少脚趾。

此外，它是在Scipy中实现的，非常好(http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/cluster.vq.html)。

下面是它在空间上解析3D集群的一个例子:

你想要做的有点不同(2D，包括压力值)，但我仍然认为你可以尝试一下。

好吧，这里有一些简单而不是非常有效的代码，但对于这样大的数据集来说，这是很好的。

import numpy as np
grid = np.array([[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
              [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.4,0.4,0.4,0,0,0],
              [0,0,0,0,0.4,1.4,1.4,1.8,0.7,0,0,0,0,0],
              [0,0,0,0,0.4,1.4,4,5.4,2.2,0.4,0,0,0,0],
              [0,0,0.7,1.1,0.4,1.1,3.2,3.6,1.1,0,0,0,0,0],
              [0,0.4,2.9,3.6,1.1,0.4,0.7,0.7,0.4,0.4,0,0,0,0],
              [0,0.4,2.5,3.2,1.8,0.7,0.4,0.4,0.4,1.4,0.7,0,0,0],
              [0,0,0.7,3.6,5.8,2.9,1.4,2.2,1.4,1.8,1.1,0,0,0],
              [0,0,1.1,5,6.8,3.2,4,6.1,1.8,0.4,0.4,0,0,0],
              [0,0,0.4,1.1,1.8,1.8,4.3,3.2,0.7,0,0,0,0,0],
              [0,0,0,0,0,0.4,0.7,0.4,0,0,0,0,0,0]])

arr = []
for i in xrange(grid.shape[0] - 1):
    for j in xrange(grid.shape[1] - 1):
        tot = grid[i][j] + grid[i+1][j] + grid[i][j+1] + grid[i+1][j+1]
        arr.append([(i,j),tot])

best = []

arr.sort(key = lambda x: x[1])

for i in xrange(5):
    best.append(arr.pop())
    badpos = set([(best[-1][0][0]+x,best[-1][0][1]+y)
                  for x in [-1,0,1] for y in [-1,0,1] if x != 0 or y != 0])
    for j in xrange(len(arr)-1,-1,-1):
        if arr[j][0] in badpos:
            arr.pop(j)


for item in best:
    print grid[item[0][0]:item[0][0]+2,item[0][1]:item[0][1]+2]

我基本上只是用左上角的位置和每个2x2平方的和来做一个数组，然后根据和来排序。然后我把和最高的2x2平方从竞争中取出，把它放在最好的数组中，然后删除所有其他使用了这个2x2平方的部分的2x2平方。

It seems to work fine except with the last paw (the one with the smallest sum on the far right in your first picture), it turns out that there are two other eligible 2x2 squares with a larger sum (and they have an equal sum to each other). One of them is still selects one square from your 2x2 square, but the other is off to the left. Fortunately, by luck we see to be choosing more of the one that you would want, but this may require some other ideas to be used to get what you actually want all of the time.

似乎你可以用jetxee的算法来欺骗一下。他发现前三个脚趾很好，你应该可以根据这个猜测出第四个脚趾的位置。

有趣的问题。我想尝试的解决方案如下。

应用一个低通滤波器，比如用二维高斯掩码卷积。这将给你一堆(可能，但不一定是浮点数)值。 使用每个爪垫(或脚趾)的已知近似半径执行2D非最大抑制。

这将为你提供最大的职位，而不是有多个候选人。澄清一下，第1步中蒙版的半径也应该与第2步中使用的半径相似。这个半径是可以选择的，或者兽医可以事先明确测量它(它会随着年龄/品种等而变化)。

建议的一些解决方案(均值漂移、神经网络等)可能在某种程度上是可行的，但它们过于复杂，可能并不理想。