I am writing an academic manuscript to describe the action of "digging certain stuff out." For instance, given an image containing several pedestrians, my image analysis techniques can extract those pedestrians as separate small images.
While "digging pedestrians out of the background image" seems legit, it sounds a bit too verbal to me. Therefore, I am writing to inquire some comments on a "formal" way of saying "digging certain stuff out" in my context. Thanks a lot.
extracting
? Extracting pedestrians from the background image.