As part of a project I'm working on, I need to find the centre-point of some "blobs" in an image using OpenCV with Python. I'm having a bit of trouble with it, and would truly appreciate any help or insight :)
My current method is to: get the contours of the images, overlay ellipses on those, use the blob detector to find the centre of each of these. This works fairly well, but occasionally I have extraneous blobs that I need to ignore, and sometimes the blobs are touching each-other.
Here's an example of when it goes well:
Good source image:
After extracting contours:
With the blobs detected:

And when it goes poorly (you can see that it's incorrectly overlayed an ellipse over three blobs, and detected one that I don't want):
Bad source image:
After extracting contours:
With the blobs detected:

This is the code I currently use. I'm unsure of any other option.
def process_and_detect(img_path):
img = cv2.imread(path)
imgray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
ret, thresh = cv2.threshold(imgray, 50, 150, 0)
im2, contours, hierarchy = cv2.findContours(thresh, cv2.RETR_TREE, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
drawn_img = np.zeros(img.shape, np.uint8)
min_area = 50
min_ellipses = []
for cnt in contours:
if cv2.contourArea(cnt) >= min_area:
ellipse = cv2.fitEllipse(cnt)
cv2.ellipse(drawn_img,ellipse,(0,255,0),-1)
plot_img(drawn_img, size=12)
# Change thresholds
params = cv2.SimpleBlobDetector_Params()
params.filterByColor = True
params.blobColor = 255
params.filterByCircularity = True
params.minCircularity = 0.75
params.filterByArea = True
params.minArea = 150
# Set up the detector
detector = cv2.SimpleBlobDetector_create(params)
# Detect blobs.
keypoints = detector.detect(drawn_img)
for k in keypoints:
x = round(k.pt[0])
y = round(k.pt[1])
line_length = 20
cv2.line(img, (x-line_length, y), (x+line_length, y), (255, 0, 0), 2)
cv2.line(img, (x, y-line_length), (x, y+line_length), (255, 0, 0), 2)
plot_img(img, size=12)
Thank you so much for reading this far, I sincerely hope someone can help me out, or point me in the right direction. Thanks!