Cotton plant is one of the most widely cultivated crop across worldwide. The leaf is one of the important parts which help in the food production. There are different cotton leaf diseases like Alternaria spot, foliar, bacterial blight, etc. which affects the agricultural yield. In order to detect the diseases, leaf region extraction becomes a significant task and to achieve this we use image processing techniques. Henceforth in this paper, a novel method used to extract the leaf region from a complex background. The proposed method is used for leaf extraction from complex background. The algorithm used in this method is modified factorization based active contour (MFACM) which helps in getting better output images. The database images used for research are acquired from the field using a digital camera. The proposed work is compared with existing active contour algorithms like Gradient Vector Flow (GVF), Adaptive Diffusion Flow (ADF), and Vector Flow Convolution (VFC). From the experiment, it can be observed that the proposed method is better than the other active contour methods in terms of computation time and the number of iterations. In addition to that segmented result is analyzed using specificity, sensitivity, precision which showed that our proposed method is better than the other methods.