Select largest object in an image

Question

I am trying to find the the largest object in an image and remove any other objects in the image that are smaller than it.

This is what I have but I cannot get it to work.

 l=bwlabel(BW);

 %the area of all objects in the image is calculated
 stat = regionprops(l,'Area','PixelIdxList');
 [maxValue,index] = max([stat.Area]);

  %remove any connected areas smaller than the biggest object
  BW2=bwareaopen(BW,[maxValue,index],8);
  subplot(5, 5, 4);
  imshow(BW2, []);

I am working with digital mammograms such as these. I am trying to remove all objects from the image except for the breast region.

Answer 1

Use bwconncomp instead since it returns the coordinate indexes for region in a separate cell, where the size of each is easily discerned:

>> BW = [1 0 0; 0 0 0; 0 1 1]; % two regions
>> CC = bwconncomp(BW)
CC = 
    Connectivity: 8
       ImageSize: [3 3]
      NumObjects: 2
    PixelIdxList: {[1]  [2x1 double]}

The PixelIdxList field is a cell array with the indexes of coordinates for each region. The length of each array is the size of each region:

>> numPixels = cellfun(@numel,CC.PixelIdxList)
numPixels =
     1     2
>> [biggestSize,idx] = max(numPixels)
biggestSize =
     2
idx =
     2

Then you can easily make a new image with just this component:

BW2 = false(size(BW));
BW2(CC.PixelIdxList{idx}) = true;

---

EDIT: From the comments, the need to crop the output image so that the region comes to the edges can be addressed with regionprops using the 'BoundingBox' option:

s  = regionprops(BW2, 'BoundingBox');

which gives you a rectangle s.BoundingBox which you can use to crop with BW3 = imcrop(BW2,s.BoundingBox);.

Answer 2

If you would like to continue with the bwlabel approach, you may use this -

Code

BW = im2bw(imread('coins.png')); %%// Coins photo from MATLAB Library

[L, num] = bwlabel(BW, 8);
count_pixels_per_obj = sum(bsxfun(@eq,L(:),1:num));
[~,ind] = max(count_pixels_per_obj);
biggest_blob = (L==ind);

%%// Display the images
figure,
subplot(211),imshow(BW)
subplot(212),imshow(biggest_blob)

Output