Binarize turning image completely black?

Question

Running Binarize (or EdgeDetect) on a filled black and white image is resulting in an all black image.

The image has the following color distribution (with most images points falling in either a zero or one bucket)

image = Import["http://imgur.com/HhsMeDc.png"] ;
ImageLevels[ image, 10 ]
...
{{{0., 640000}, {0.1, 0}, {0.2, 0}, {0.3, 0}, {0.4, 0}, {0.5,
   0}, {0.6, 0}, {0.7, 0}, {0.8, 0}, {0.9, 0}},
 {{0., 640000}, {0.1,
   0}, {0.2, 0}, {0.3, 0}, {0.4, 0}, {0.5, 0}, {0.6, 0}, {0.7,
   0}, {0.8, 0}, {0.9, 0}},
 {{0., 640000}, {0.1, 0}, {0.2, 0}, {0.3,
   0}, {0.4, 0}, {0.5, 0}, {0.6, 0}, {0.7, 0}, {0.8, 0}, {0.9,
   0}},
 {{0., 370003}, {0.1, 809}, {0.2, 605}, {0.3, 555}, {0.4,
   612}, {0.5, 550}, {0.6, 580}, {0.7, 616}, {0.8, 764}, {0.9,
   264906}}}

This binarize attempt:

b = Binarize[ image ] 
ImageLevels[ b ]

produces an all black image, with the levels showing only zero values:

 {{0, 640000}, {1, 0}}

I tried various thresholds, including the default and some explicit values (or 0.5, 0.9, 0.1, ...), but still get the all zero levels?

Answer 1

The reason is that this PNG image is defined purely by applying an alpha channel to a completely uniform foreground color. The alpha channel however is ignored in Binarize and therefore you get a uniform output. You can see this by saying

RemoveAlphaChannel[image]

and

AlphaChannel[image]

The latter shows the shape, while the former doesn't contain any shape.