tac_contact_mask — 2D tactile op

Data kinds: imageregion

Call: fullseye.apply(img, "tac_contact_mask", a=0.5, b=0.5) (the 2-D model is one image plus two scalar knobs a,b∈[0,1])

tac_contact_mask: input → output

*The figure is the actual output on a synthetic 128×128 input. Left: input, right: output. Point clouds are drawn as a top-down scatter (brightness = z), 1-D series as a line plot, volumes as the maximum-intensity projection along z, videos as the middle frame, complex images as magnitude; return values that are not pictures are shown as the values themselves.*

Sweeping knob a (0.1 / 0.5 / 0.9, the other knob at its default):

tac_contact_mask: knob a sweep (docs site)

Sweeping knob b (0.1 / 0.5 / 0.9, the other knob at its default):

tac_contact_mask: knob b sweep (docs site)

On other images (synthetic scene / photo / coins. Top row: inputs, bottom row: their outputs. Knobs at default):

tac_contact_mask: other inputs (docs site)

*The 4th column is a colour (H,W,3) input. This op handles colour without crossing channels (it does not convolve the colour channel as a third spatial axis).*

Usage

Contact region of a tactile frame by pseudo-reference background subtraction: `dev = |v - G_sigma(v)| with sigma = max(2, min(H,W)/6) (the low-frequency envelope stands in for the undeformed reference frame), thresholded at thr = 0.005 + 0.145*a gray levels, then cleaned with round(3*b) iterations of binary opening followed by binary closing (3x3, 8-connected). a = deviation threshold (sensitivity), b` = morphological cleanup strength. Returns a BINARY 0/1 float64 region of the input HxW; a perfectly flat (constant) frame has zero deviation everywhere and therefore yields an EMPTY mask.

Blank frame (measured): feeding an image of uniform brightness gives an empty result — every pixel is background (0) — regardless of the brightness. Pure white and pure black behave alike; brightness by itself detects nothing.

References (sample data, literature)

• Sample-data catalog (download URLs / licences) — 2-D uses skimage.data (BSD/public domain) plus synthetic images; 3-D lists download URLs for real data sources (Stanford, PDS, …).

• Operator provenance and references — the sources of the research/methods this op family came from.

Try it in Studio

The program below has been verified to run (same input as the figure). In Studio's help this block becomes buttons that load and run it on the spot.

tac_contact_mask 0.50 0.50

▸ Load this pipeline  ·  Load & run

Runnable examples (verified samples that actually call this op)

sim2real_and_alifepy -3.11 examples/sim2real_and_alife.py

Ops the type connects to (they accept region as input)

identity · reg_erode · reg_dilate · reg_open · reg_close · fill_holes · select_largest · remove_small

Same category (tactile)

tac_height_from_shading · tac_surface_normal · tac_pressure_proxy · tac_shear_field


*Provenance: ops.py — 2D operator registry. This per-op note is generated by tools/opdocs.py md (do not hand-edit).*

© 2026 Kazufumi Furuse — Fullseye operator documentation. Licensed under Apache-2.0.