I am trying the make the life of one of my friends easier regarding to the project that he is working. He has a bunch of images like this one:
and the purpose is to extract the white dots. I tried different kind of filters, and the best that I managed to get was by using Scharr:
and the bitwise_nor version of it:
now I the problem is that some dots are not that acute so if I apply threshold I erase quite some of them or I am not able to extract all of them. I tried to segment the image into blocks and apply different threshold to each of the blocks and then recreate the image but the result is not that good as well (actually worse). As I can see the main problem is the noise in-between. If you can think something that might help to eliminate this noise, I would be grateful. It seems so easy, but for some reason I am stuck.