MATLAB: How to count closely spaced muscle fibers in a cross sectional image

Question

Given this image:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/18/97qf.jpg/

I would like to:

-count the number of mucsle fibers

-calculate the area of each of the muscle fibers

-find the min/max diameter of each of the muscle fibers

My initial thought was to:

-reduce noise by using sobel filter or canny edge filter

-use circular hough transform to identify the muscle fibers

-create active contours

I got stuck on trying to implement the circular hough transform.

Any and all help is appreciated Thanks Mohammad

Answer 1

I'd use a manual counting system to get a count of the fibers - ask the users to click on a fiber with ginput(). Then I'd threshold to find the bright white pixels. You might have to clean up a little to get rid of any white things that appear inside a fiber. So now you know the area of the fibers (=area of image - area of white), and the count, so you can get the average area of the fiber set.