Best way to automatically segment image consisting of central elliptical section and touching blobs?

I am looking for a way to automatically segment images that consist of a central elliptical section and additional 'blobs' that touch this section, such as the mushroom cloud at the top of this image. This needs to work for a wide range of different images with this characteristic. My images are binary images. So far, I have tried bwdist with watershed but this has not worked well.

Answer 1

[Richa Gupta]

Hi DM,

MATLAB provides “ hough ” function that implements the Standard Hough Transform (SHT). This function can detect shapes which can be represented using parametric equations.

But in your case if it would be difficult to represent the shape parametrically (using an analytical function), you can use Generalized Hough Transform (GHT). An implementation of GHT can be found on MATLAB File Exchange. Here is the link to the submission:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/44166-generalized-hough-transform

Hope this helps.

Richa