How to add border to an image, choosing color dynamically based on image edge color(s)?

Question

I need to add a border to each image in a set of tightly cropped logos. The border color should either match the most commonly used color along the edge, OR, if there are too many different edge colors, it should choose some sort of average of the edge colors.

Here's an example. In this case, I would want the added border to be the same color as the image "background" (using that term in the lay sense). A significant majority of the pixels along the edges are that color, and there are only two other colors, so the decision algorithm would be able to select that rather drecky greenish tan for the added border (not saying anything bad about the organization behind the logo, mind you).

Does Pillow have any functions to simplify this task?

I found answers that show how to use Pillow to add borders and how to determine the average color of an entire image. But I couldn't find any code that looks only at the edges of an image and finds the predominant color, which color could then be used in the border-adding routine. Just in case someone has already done that work, please point me to it. ('Edges' meaning bands of pixels along the top/bottom/left/right margins of the image, whose height or width would be specified as a percentage of the image's total size.)

Short of pointing me to a gist that solves my whole problem, are there Pillow routines that look at edges and/or that count the colors in a pixel range and put them into an array or what not?

I see here that OpenCV can add a border the duplicates the color of the each outermost pixel along all four edges, but that looks funky—I want a solid-color border. And I'd prefer to stick with Pillow—unless another library can do the whole edge-color-analysis-and-add-border procedure in one step, more or less, in which case, please point it out.

Answer 1

Overwrite the center part of the image with some fixed color, that – most likely – won't be present within the edge. For that, maybe use a color with a certain alpha value. Then, there's a function getcolors, which exactly does, what you're looking for. Sort the resulting list, and get the color with the highest count. (That, often, will be the color we used to overwrite the center part. So check for that, and take the second entry, if needed.) Finally, use ImageOps.expand to add the actual border.

That'd be the whole code:

from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageOps

# Open image, enforce RGB with alpha channel
img = Image.open('path/to/your/image.png').convert('RGBA')
w, h = img.size

# Set up edge margin to look for dominant color
me = 3

# Set up border margin to be added in dominant color
mb = 30

# On an image copy, set non edge pixels to (0, 0, 0, 0)
img_copy = img.copy()
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img_copy)
draw.rectangle((me, me, w - (me + 1), h - (me + 1)), (0, 0, 0, 0))

# Count colors, first entry most likely is color used to overwrite pixels
n_colors = sorted(img_copy.getcolors(2 * me * (w + h) + 1), reverse=True)
dom_color = n_colors[0][1] if n_colors[0][1] != (0, 0, 0, 0) else n_colors[1][1]

# Add border
img = ImageOps.expand(img, mb, dom_color).convert('RGB')

# Save image
img.save('with_border.png')

That'd be the result for your example:

And, that's some output for another image:

It's up to you to decide, whether there are several dominant colors, which you want to mix or average. You'd need to inspect the n_colors appropriately on the several counts for that. That's quite a lot of work, which is left out here.

----------------------------------------
System information
----------------------------------------
Platform:      Windows-10-10.0.16299-SP0
Python:        3.9.1
PyCharm:       2021.1
Pillow:        8.2.0
----------------------------------------