Flood fill using a stack

Question

I am using the recursive Flood fill algorithm in Java to fill some areas of a image. With very small images it works fine, but when de image becomes larger the JVM gives me a Stack Over Flow Error.

That's the reason why I have to reimplement the method using a Flood Fill with my own stack. (I read that's the best way to do it in these kind of cases)

Can anyone explain me how to code it? (if you don't have the code at hand, with the pseudo-code of the algorithm will be fine)

I've read a lot in the Internet but I haven't understood it very well.

EDIT: I added my recursive code

public void floodFill(int x, int y, Color targetColor,Color replacementColor) {

    if (img.getRGB(x, y) != targetColor.getRGB()) return;

    img.setRGB(x, y, replacementColor.getRGB());
    floodFill(x - 1, y, targetColor, replacementColor);
    floodFill(x + 1, y, targetColor, replacementColor);
    floodFill(x, y - 1, targetColor, replacementColor);
    floodFill(x, y + 1, targetColor, replacementColor);

    return;

}

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use Queue to remove recursion from floodfill algorithm. Here are some basic ideas:

1. Have a way to mark visited points
2. At the beginning, queue the start point.
3. While the queue is not empty, continue dequeuing its element. And with each element
   1. Fill its color and mark just-dequeued point as visited
   2. Enqueue unvisited adjacent points that has the same color

The below is my Java code to solve similar but different problem of blob detection. I hope you can get some ideas from this and can adapt it the the problem. The code is not well-factored though.

package blobdetector;

import java.awt.Point;
import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.LinkedList;
import java.util.Queue;
import javax.imageio.ImageIO;
import javax.management.Query;

public class Main {

    public Main() {
    }

    public static boolean isBlack(BufferedImage image, int posX, int posY) {

        int color = image.getRGB(posX, posY);

        int brightness = (color & 0xFF) + ((color >> 2) & 0xFF)
        + ((color >> 4) & 0xFF);
        brightness /= 3;

        return brightness < 128;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        if (args.length != 1) {
            System.err.println("ERROR: Pass filename as argument.");
            return;
        }

        String filename = args[0];
        // String filename =
        // "C:\\Users\\Natthawut\\Desktop\\blob.jpg";
        try {
            BufferedImage bimg = ImageIO.read(new File(filename));

            boolean[][] painted = new boolean[bimg.getHeight()][bimg.getWidth()];

            for (int i = 0; i < bimg.getHeight(); i++) {
                for (int j = 0; j < bimg.getWidth(); j++) {

                    if (isBlack(bimg, j, i) && !painted[i][j]) {

                        Queue<Point> queue = new LinkedList<Point>();
                        queue.add(new Point(j, i));

                        int pixelCount = 0;
                        while (!queue.isEmpty()) {
                            Point p = queue.remove();

                            if ((p.x >= 0)
                                    && (p.x < bimg.getWidth() && (p.y >= 0) && (p.y < bimg
                                            .getHeight()))) {
                                if (!painted[p.y][p.x]
                                                  && isBlack(bimg, p.x, p.y)) {
                                    painted[p.y][p.x] = true;
                                    pixelCount++;

                                    queue.add(new Point(p.x + 1, p.y));
                                    queue.add(new Point(p.x - 1, p.y));
                                    queue.add(new Point(p.x, p.y + 1));
                                    queue.add(new Point(p.x, p.y - 1));
                                }
                            }
                        }
                        System.out.println("Blob detected : " + pixelCount
                                + " pixels");
                    }

                }
            }

        } catch (IOException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
        }

    }

}

Test input: