Segment certain regions of a binary image

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I have a binary image, which i would like to extract segments (labeled 1,2,3,4) from.
My previous approach to this was to sum the non-zero pixels on each line, and eventually get a plots with peaks. Using this plot, I determined the location of each peak using the built-in findpeaks function, along with their widths, in order to isolate these portions. This worked fairly well. However, using widths and location of the peaks does not give an accurate representation of the starting and ending points of the peaks.
I'm wondering if there is an alternative approach to this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Attached is a .mat file containing the binary data for this image.
  6 Comments
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 17 Nov 2015
Do you always know there will be straight segments in between the bushy ones? What if the whole plant looks like a bushy pine tree with no long "trunk-only" sections? Could that happen? Actually your section 3 and 4 don't have a straight run between them, and it's not straight after 4 either. How is some algorithm to know that segment 4 should not go all the way to the bottom? It looks like there are so many variations that you're going to have to have tons of special "rules" in any algorithm that can detect special cases/shapes.
seven_dwarves
seven_dwarves on 18 Nov 2015
@Image Analyst, Most times there should be a straight segment between them. It definitely may happen where it becomes bushy and the trunk becomes covered by these leaves. However, plants that look like that is only a small subset of the entire set, so if an algorithm fails there, it is fine with me.
As for segment 4, i am able to find the stop point by a simple row-wise pixel count. So if the number of pixels in that row exceed a threshold, I remove all the rows beneath it.
Plants are very tricky to work with as they tend to grow in many different shapes. I understand that having one robust algorithm that is able to work on thousands of different images is next to impossible due to the complexity of the way plants grow. I am just wondering if there is a way to work with these simpler looking images so that majority of the analysis can be done with a computer, while I can manually crop the ones that are too complex.

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Answers (1)

seven_dwarves
seven_dwarves on 17 Nov 2015
Image Analyst, any response?

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