Automatic detection and counting of circular shaped overlapped objects using circular hough transform and contour detection

It is an important task to count the number of the objects in the image automatically. Because the objects in the image are sometimes overlapped with each other and even covered with different shaped objects, it is very difficult to detach these objects before counting them. Circular Hough transform has been used extensively to detect and count overlapped objects with circular shapes. However it can not detach the overlapping circular objects efficiently, and the counting task will provide inaccurate results when the circular objects are covered with random shaped objects. To deal with this problem, an integrated method is proposed based on the Hough Transform and Contour Detection methods. Furthermore, a software is implemented using the open source computer vision library Opencv 3.0 with visual studio 2012. The experimental results show that the proposed method can detach and count the objects accurately.