Detecting a hand above a chessboard using opencv - opencv

Question

I am developing an android application for analyzing chess games based on series of photos. To process images, I am using OpenCV. My question is how can I detect that there is a player's hand on a picture? Because I would like to filter those photos and analyze only the ones with the only chessboard on them.
So far I managed to get the Canny, so from an image like that
original image
I am able to get that canny
.
But I have no idea what can I do next...
The code I used to get Canny:
Mat gray, blur, cannyed;
cvtColor(img, gray, CV_BGR2GRAY);
GaussianBlur(gray, blur, Size(7, 7), 0, 0);
Canny(blur, cannyed, 50, 100, 3);
I would highly appreciate any ideas and advice on what to do next and what OpenCV functions can I use.

Answer 1

You have a very nice spectrum in the chess board. A hand in it messes up the frequencies built up by the regular transitions between the black and white squares. Try moving a bigger square (let's say the size of a 4.5 x 4.5 squares) around and see what happens to the frequencies.
Another approach if you have the sequence of pictures taken as a movie is to analyse the motions. Take the difference of consecutive frames (low pass filter them a bit first) to detect motions. Filter the motions in time (over several frames). Then threshold these motions to get a binary image. Erode the binary shapes to filter out small moving objects (noise, chess figure) be able to detect if any larger moving shape is on the board (e.g. a hand).

Answer 2

Here, After Canny Edge detection the morphological operations of horizontal and vertical lines extraction process i tried.
Mat horizontal = cannyed.clone();
// Specify size on horizontal axis
int horizontalsize = horizontal.cols / 60;
// Create structure element for extracting horizontal lines through morphology operations
Mat horizontalStructure = getStructuringElement(MORPH_RECT, Size(horizontalsize,1));
erode(horizontal, horizontal, horizontalStructure, Point(-1, -1),2);
dilate(horizontal, horizontal, horizontalStructure, Point(-1, -1),1);
imshow("horizontal",horizontal);
Mat vertical = cannyed.clone();
// Specify size on horizontal axis
int verticalsize = vertical.cols / 60;
// Create structure element for extracting horizontal lines through morphology operations
Mat verticalStructure = getStructuringElement(MORPH_RECT, Size(1,verticalsize));
erode(vertical, vertical, verticalStructure, Point(-1, -1));
dilate(vertical, vertical, verticalStructure, Point(-1, -1),2);
imshow("vertical",vertical);
the results are ,
Horizontal Lines in the chess board
Then, from the figure you can see there is a proper interval in between the lines. The area where hand is present there is more interval in lines.
In that location, if contour is done, the hand (or any object ) over the chess board can be detected.
This helps to solve for any object when placed over chess board.

Answer 3

Thank you all very much for your suggestions.
So I solved the problem mostly using Gowthaman's method. First I use his code to generate vertical and horizontal lines. Then I combine them like this:
Mat combined = vertical + horizontal;
So I get something like that when there is no hand
or like that when there is a hand
.
Next I count white pixels using the code:
int GetPixelCount(Mat image, uchar color)
{
int result = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < image.rows; i++)
{
for (int j = 0; j < image.cols; j++)
{
if (image.at<uchar>(Point(j, i)) == color)
result++;
}
}
return result;
}
I do that for every photo in the series. First photo is always without a hand, so I use is as a template. If current photo has less then 98% of template white pixels then I deduce there is hand (or something else) in it.
Most likely this is not an optimal method and has lots of weaknesses, but it is very simple and works for me just fine :)