leaf extraction from a complicated imaged (soil, occluded leaves..etc)

Hello,

I'm working on a project, and want to extract leaves from a complicated background image. According to some papers, basically steps:

• non-green background elimination
• morphological operations,
• watershed sementation,
• extracted image

But on the other hand, segmentation adjustments has to be arranged according to every leaf (light,resolution..etc) to have optimum result.

Do you suggest any other method to achieve such a work? If you could support also the matlab codes, I would be appreciated.

For example, after I get below orjinal image, Like below second image should be remained. Only one targeted leaf or leaves should remain at the end. If this code could work at 3rd image below, it would be more better.

1.st; original image:

 2nd; extracted image:

3rd; more complex image: