Identify the maize tassel and count the total number of it

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Hi, I am very new to OpenCV, What I am trying to do is identify the maize tassel from the following image

The way I tried is "template matching" from openCV Here is the template:

the method I used is cv2.TM_CCOEFF_NORMED, and the threshold I used is 0.7 after matching, I got:

Perfect point out my template!! However, what I want is circle out all maize tassels in the picture. I tried to use a lower threshold, like 0.6, and got:

which showed lots of non-specific targets... Any suggestion will be appreciated, thanks a lot. Please remind me if I didn't give enough information here.

Best, Shu-Yun