Not in general, though with fancier algorithms you can find some gradients (edges). For example using the range filter in the Image Processing Toolbox:
I = imread('liftingbody.png');
J = rangefilt(I);
imshow(I), figure, imshow(J);
or using stdfilt() or graycomatrix(). But these are a little more complicated than a simple global histogram of the whole image.
