Insect egg detection/counting missing connected blobs

I am working to create a fairly simple function that will count the eggs in images similar to this: https://imgur.com/tyCt9XK

I have been able to get a clean grayscale image (easy): https://imgur.com/A5EqyRA

Then perform some bw conversion and erosion: https://imgur.com/jJkHBuV

I am just not sure the best way to count these objects. When I use Connected Components, it counts a large section of the eggs as a single object and the count is far off. That's understandable as they are connected in the bw image.

There are 165 eggs, so that's my target result... Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

[KALYAN ACHARJYA]

It not so easy answered exactly, though I have answered, so that you get some idea, you can try with differnt apparoach to get the expected results.

One way, for me , it seems easier way to try on it

• Gray Image
• Contrast enhancement or Equalization
• Thresholding
• Morphological operations
• Counts the disjoint objects

I have tried the following way, It doesnt giving the result, it gives you the idea, how you can proceed. You can modifiy thr code to get the ewsults

grayImage=rgb2gray(imread('egg_count.jpg'));
enhancedImage=histeq(grayImage);
thValue=220;
bwImage=enhancedImage>thValue;
bwImage_largest=bwareafilt(bwImage,4,'Largest');
bwImage_result=xor(bwImage_largest,bwImage);
% Morpho
result=imerode(bwImage_result,strel(10));
%When you get the acceptable result Image, you can counts white blobs

Another way, tried with CHT (Circular Hope Transform), But I am not sure wheather it works for so smaller circular objects

Regards

Kalyan Acharjya