OpenCV Image to Black and White Shape - c++

Question

i want the hand image to be a black and white shape of the hand. here's a sample of the input and the desired output:
using a threshold doesn't give the desired output because some of the colors inside the hand are the same with the background color. how can i get the desired output?

Answer 1

Adaptive threshold, find contours, floodfill?
Basically, adaptive threshold turns your image into black and white, but takes the threshold level based on local conditions around each pixel - that way, you should avoid the problem you're experiencing with an ordinary threshold. In fact, I'm not sure why anyone would ever want to use a normal threshold.
If that doesn't work, an alternative approach is to find the largest contour in the image, draw it onto a separate matrix and then floodfill everything inside it with black. (Floodfill is like the bucket tool in MSPaint - it starts at a particular pixel, and fills in everything connected to that pixel which is the same colour with another colour of your choice.)
Possibly the most robust approach against various lighting conditions is to do them all in the sequence at the top. But you may be able to get away with only the threshold or the countours/floodfill.
By the way, perhaps the trickiest part is actually finding the contours, because findContours returns an arraylist/vector/whatever (depends on the platform I think) of MatOfPoints. MatOfPoint is a subclass of Mat but you can't draw it directly - you need to use drawContours. Here's some code for OpenCV4Android that I know works:
private Mat drawLargestContour(Mat input) {
/** Allocates and returns a black matrix with the
* largest contour of the input matrix drawn in white. */
List<MatOfPoint> contours = new ArrayList<MatOfPoint>();
Imgproc.findContours(input, contours, new Mat() /* hierarchy */,
Imgproc.RETR_EXTERNAL, Imgproc.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE);
double maxArea = 0;
int index = -1;
for (MatOfPoint contour : contours) { // iterate over every contour in the list
double area = Imgproc.contourArea(contour);
if (area > maxArea) {
maxArea = area;
index = contours.indexOf(contour);
}
}
if (index == -1) {
Log.e(TAG, "Fatal error: no contours in the image!");
}
Mat border = new Mat(input.rows(), input.cols(), CvType.CV_8UC1); // initialized to 0 (black) by default because it's Java :)
Imgproc.drawContours(border, contours, index, new Scalar(255)); // 255 = draw contours in white
return border;
}

Answer 2

Two quick things you can try:
After thresholding you can:
Do a morphological closing,
or, the most straightforward: cv::findContours, keep the largest if it's more than one, then draw it using cv::fillConvexPoly and you will get this mask. (fillConvexPoly will fill the holes for you)