I have a sequence of images taken from a camera. The images consists of hand and surroundings. I need to remove everything except the hand.
I am new to Image processing. Would anyone help me in regard with the above Question. I am comfortable using C and Matlab.
A really simple approach if you have a stationary background and a moving hand (and quite a few images!) is simply to take the average of the set of images away from each image. If nothing else, it's a gentle introduction to Matlab.
The name of the problem you are trying to solve is "Image Segmentation". The Wikipedia page here: wiki is a good start.
If lighting consistency isn't a problem for you, I'd suggest starting with simple RGB thresholding and see how far that gets you before trying anything more complicated.
Have a look at OpenCV, a FOSS library for computer vision applications. Specifically, see the Video Surveillance module. For a walk through of background subtraction in MATLAB, see this EETimes article.
Can you specify what kind of images you have. Is the background moving or static? For a static background it is a bit straightforward. You simply need to subtract the incoming image from the background image. You can use some morphological operations to make it look better. They all depend on the quality of images that you have. If you have moving background I would suggest you go for color based segmentation. Convert the image to YCbCr then threshold appropriately. I know there are some papers available on it(However I dont have time to locate them). I suggest reading them first. Here is one link which might help you. Read the skin segmentation part.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee368/Project_03/Project/reports/ee368group08.pdf
background subtraction is simple to implement (estimate background as average of all frames, then subtract each frame from background and threshold resulting absolute difference) but unfortunately only works well if 1. camera has manual gain and exposure 2. lighting conditions do not change 3.background is stationary. 4. the background is visible for much longer than the foreground.
given your description i assume these are not the case - so what you can use - as already pointed out - is colour as a means of segmenting foreground from background. as it's a hand you are trying to isolate best bet is to learn the hand colour. opencv provides some means of doing this. if you want to do this yourself you just get the colour of some of the hand pixels (you would need to specify this manually for at least one frame) and convert them to HUE (which encapsulates the colour in a brightness independen way. skin colour has a very constant hue) and then make a HUE histogram. compare this to the rest of the pixels and then decided if the hue is simmilar enough.
