opencv area of contour - opencv

Question

I am trying to find the contours of an animal from a picture. Let's assume it is a chicken. From the picture I could find its contours but they aren't closed. Also, I am getting a lot of noise from the background which is white ( same as the chicken).
I am using a simple code found on stackoverflow.
import numpy as np
import cv2
img = cv2.imread('lateral.jpg')
imgray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
# blurred = cv2.GaussianBlur(imgray, (5, 5), 0)
# edged = cv2.Canny(blurred, 10, 11) # 10 and 40 to be more perceptive
# contours_canny= cv2.findContours(edged.copy(), cv2.RETR_LIST, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)[-2]
edges = cv2.Canny(imgray, 10,30)
cv2.imshow('edges', edges)
k = cv2.waitKey()
Is there a way to find just the contour of this chicken?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Finding contour is quite easy. The problem is that your image has low contrast between the chicken and the background. So, your idea of using canny edges was not bad, it just needed some post processing.
I guess this is what you are looking for:
import cv2
import numpy as np
image = cv2.imread("./chicken.jpg", cv2.IMREAD_COLOR)
image = cv2.resize(image, (0,0), fx=0.5, fy=0.5)
imgray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2LAB)[...,0]
edges = cv2.Canny(imgray, 10,30)
blurred = cv2.GaussianBlur(edges, (9, 9), 0)
clahe = cv2.createCLAHE(clipLimit=5.0, tileGridSize=(32,32))
contrast = clahe.apply(blurred)
ret, thresh = cv2.threshold(contrast, 20, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY|cv2.THRESH_OTSU)
_, contours, _ = cv2.findContours(thresh.copy(), cv2.RETR_TREE, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE)
maxArea = 0
best = None
for contour in contours:
area = cv2.contourArea(contour)
print (area)
if area > maxArea :
maxArea = area
best = contour
cv2.drawContours(image, [best], 0, (0, 0, 255), -1)
while True:
cv2.imshow("result", image)
k = cv2.waitKey(30) & 0xff
if k == 27:
break