Find tracing/plotting stacked bands/lines in an image
Why not try just summing the columns of the image?



Well, you could try smoothing the image first, but that will have the same effect as just smoothing the output.



R code for this is below the first lot.

Here's the extra image, processed.





R Code Below

# 26593
# install.packages("png")

file &lt;- "Q26593_original.png"

library(png)

img &lt;- readPNG(file)

d &lt;- dim(img)

par(mfrow=c(2,1))
plot(1:2, type='n', main="Plotting Over an Image", xlab="x", ylab="y")
lim &lt;- par()
rasterImage(img, lim$usr[1], lim$usr[3], lim$usr[2], lim$usr[4])

plot(colSums(img[,,1]), type="l")




R Code #2 Below

# 26593
# install.packages("png")
# install.packages("EBImage") --- Didn't work.
# ## try http if https is not available
# source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
# biocLite("EBImage")

file &lt;- "Q26593_original.png"

library(png)
library(EBImage)

img &lt;- readPNG(file)

d &lt;- dim(img)

#xx &lt;- (0:(d[2]-1) - d[2]/2)/d[2]
#yy &lt;- (0:(d[1]-1) - d[1]/2)/d[1]
#sigma &lt;- 0.2

#w &lt;-  exp(-yy*yy/sigma) %*%  t(exp(-xx*xx/sigma)) 
#w1 &lt;- exp(-yy*yy/sigma) %*% t(rep(1,d[2]))

f &lt;- makeBrush(11, shape='disc', step=FALSE)
imgf &lt;- filter2(img, f)
imgf &lt;- imgf/max(imgf)

par(mfrow=c(3,1))
plot(1:2, type='n', main="Filtered Image", xlab="x", ylab="y")
lim &lt;- par()
rasterImage(imgf, lim$usr[1], lim$usr[3], lim$usr[2], lim$usr[4])

#plot(1:2, type='n', main="Window Function", xlab="x", ylab="y")
#lim &lt;- par()
#rasterImage(w1, lim$usr[1], lim$usr[3], lim$usr[2], lim$usr[4])

plot(colSums(imgf[,,1]), type="l", main="Column sum of filtered image")

plot(filter(colSums(img[,,1]), rep(1,11)), type="l", main="Column sum of unfiltered image, filtered")