copyobj copies entire image instead of axes only - image

Question

What I have is a plot showing the area of connected components. What I want to do is to further work on the plot figure such as clean it up a bit or imcomplement it etc. and then be able to apply the axes from the original plot to this image and be able to extract the ylabel.
Let me explain the above issue with my code and some examples.
This is the plot I have, the y-axis represents the object areas. This is the important axis that I want to transfer to the new image.
Since I am interested in the axes only I copy that using
h = findobj(gcf,'type','axes');
So that I can work with the figure without the axes and borders interfering I save it without these attributes
set(gca, 'visible', 'off'); % Hide the axis and borders
hgexport(gcf, 'plot1.jpg', hgexport('factorystyle'), 'Format', 'jpeg');
This is what I get:
So far so good.
Now comes the processing or in other words changing the plot to my needs.
plot_img = rgb2gray(imread('plot1.jpg'));
img_bw_plot = im2bw(plot_img, graythresh(plot_img));
[rows cols] = size(plot_img);
new = zeros(size(plot_img));
for i = 1: rows
for j = 1: cols
if (img_bw_plot(i,j) == 0)
new(i, 1:10) = 255;
end
end
end
f = figure;
imshow(new);
copyobj(h,f)
This produces a weird overlapped image where instead of copying only the axes, the entire image is copied on top of the new. The datacursormode also fails to work beyond the over lapping image.

Answer 1

First of all I'm a little bit confused that if you have the figure in the first place why aren't you extracting your data from it using something like:
lines=findobj(gca,'type','line');
y=zeros(1,length(lines));
for i=1:length(lines)
y(i)=get(lines(i),'ydata');
end
and there you'll have all the data.
But let's say the original figure isn't like a figure figure where you'd have access to the children of the axes object (though all of them being copied together kind of suggests that this is not the case). What you need to realize is that an "axes" object in MATLAB isn't just the axes of the graph, but the whole graph. For example when you have 5 subplots, each of those smaller plots is an axes object and the graph itself is one of its children which is a "line" object (refer to my example above).
So after this long lecture :), one solution is that you could manually create those axes around your newly drawn image instead of copying the axes object as such:
set(gca,'visible','on');
s=size(new);
set(gca,'ytick',linspace(1,s(1),7),'yticklabel',linspace(6000,0,7));
This should do the trick of placing 7 ticks on the y-axis in the same manner as you have on your original figure. The same method would apply to manually creating the labels for the x-axis.
(I tried putting the resulting image here but I don't have the enough reputations to do so. That's on stackoverflow bro!)
Mind you, though, that this creates the labels on the graph giving you the illusion of the same axis while the actual coordinates of the points are actually determined by the size of the image you're saving. So if you want to make sure the image is the same size, you need to work on resizing your original figure to end up being the same size, which given then 0-6000, would be a really big image.