I need to find areas with bulk of spherical objects (for further analysis) when the image contains also areas which are not interesting. A typical image looks like this:
I tried texture analysis using Gabor filter, rotating them around, and checking where they match multiple directions (threshold and blur the result, add all of them together, dilate the result to get contiguous area), indicating there are edges in all directions (which will be the case for spheres but not for flat areas, like that one on the right) - this is in one particular direction:
and this is the final result:
It could be made better by tuning various params, but before I go there: I'd like to have suggestions for a better-suited algorithm for this task -- I've been browsing the internet for texture analysis strategies, such as Haralick features, SURF and others, but having no experience with any of those, it is hard to decide which path to pursue. I hope someone might point me to the right direction. The implementation will be in c++/OpenCV. Thanks!