Create boundary around the object - matlab

Question

I have the input image. I want to create the boundary around the object and marked the boundary pixels as gray i.e. 128 intensity value. I need this type of output image. I traced the boundary of the object:
level = graythresh(im);
BW = im2bw(im,level);
figure; imshow(BW);
[B,L] = bwboundaries(BW,'noholes');
imshow(im);
hold on
for k = 1:length(B)
boundary = B{k};
plot(boundary(:,2), boundary(:,1), 'Color', [0.5 0.5 0.5], 'LineWidth', 5)
end
But it will only plot the boundary over the image. I want to create this boundary around the object of input image. How can I do this? I hope my question is clear.

Answer 1

While I don't know why you wan this, a word of advice: you may not want to do it. You are losing information of the image by doing so. It is possible that for you application knowing the indices of the boundaries is enough, and you do already know them.
However, this is what you would need to do in case of really wanting to do it:
clear;
clc;
im=imread('https://i.stack.imgur.com/r7uQz.jpg');
im=im(31:677,90:1118);
level = graythresh(im);
BW = im2bw(im,level);
[B,L] = bwboundaries(BW,'noholes');
for k = 1:length(B)
boundary = B{k};
%%%%%%%%% Fill the boundary locations with he desired value.
for ii=1:size(boundary,1)
im(boundary(ii,1), boundary(ii,2))=128;
end
end
If you want "fat" lines as in your image, add this after:
im128=im==128;
bigboundary=imdilate(im128,ones(5));
im(bigboundary)=128;

Answer 2

You can binarize the image and detect the contours using OpenCV.
Here is the Python implementation:
img = cv2.imread(r'D:\Image\temp1.jpg')
gray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
ret,bw = cv2.threshold(gray,100,255,cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
_,contours,hierarchy = cv2.findContours(bw, cv2.RETR_CCOMP, 1)
for cnt in contours:
c = np.random.randint(0,256,3)
c = (int(c[0]), int(c[1]), int(c[2]))
cv2.drawContours(img,[cnt],0,c,2)
Output image: