Counting erythrocytes - opencv

Question

I'm trying to count the number of erythrocytes on a microscope image. These are the smaller cells. (I've tried first using CNN and sliding window, but it was too slow, so I'm looking for a simplier segmentation)
My approach is:
threshold
find and draw all contours filled so that the cells won't have holes,
make distance transform
iterating over all maxima
masking out a current maximum with a circle having the radius of the maximum and storing the maximum position
My problem is, some cells have a "hole" in the middle - bright area similar by the value to background. If I threshold the image, some of the cell-masks become not a circle but a half circle, with the distance-transform values far below expected value.
I've marked the cells having the "holes" on the mask image.
Hov could I close the hole or the circle? Is there a threshold method or trick?
Below is the part of code responsible for cell extraction:
cv::adaptiveThreshold(_imgIn ,th, 255, ADAPTIVE_THRESH_GAUSSIAN_C, (bgblack ? CV_THRESH_BINARY: CV_THRESH_BINARY_INV), 35, 5 );//| CV_THRESH_OTSU);
Mat kernel1 = Mat::ones(3, 3, CV_8UC1);
for (int i=0; i< 5;i++)
{
dilate(th, th, kernel1);
erode(th, th, kernel1);
}
vector<vector<Point> > contours;
findContours(th, contours, CV_RETR_EXTERNAL, CV_CHAIN_APPROX_NONE);
mask = 0;
for( unsigned int i = 0; i < contours.size(); i++ )
{
drawContours(mask, contours, i, Scalar(255), CV_FILLED);
}
cv::distanceTransform(mask, dist, CV_DIST_L2, 3);
}
double min, max;
cv::Point pmax;
Mat tmp1 = dist.clone();
while (true)
{
cv::minMaxLoc(tmp1, 0, &max, 0, &pmax);
if ( max < 5 )
break;
cv::circle(_imgIn, pmax, 3 , cv::Scalar(0), CV_FILLED );
cv::circle(tmp1, pmax, max , cv::Scalar(0), CV_FILLED );
}

Answer 1

Closing holes
Closing is an important operator from the field of mathematical morphology. Like its dual operator opening, it can be derived from the fundamental operations of erosion and dilation. Like those operators it is normally applied to binary images, although there are graylevel versions. Closing is similar in some ways to dilation in that it tends to enlarge the boundaries of foreground (bright) regions in an image (and shrink background color holes in such regions), but it is less destructive of the original boundary shape. As with other morphological operators, the exact operation is determined by a structuring element. The effect of the operator is to preserve background regions that have a similar shape to this structuring element, or that can completely contain the structuring element, while eliminating all other regions of background pixels.
In Open CV this looks as follows
import cv2 as cv
import numpy as np
img = cv.imread('j.png',0)
kernel = np.ones((5,5),np.uint8)
erosion = cv.erode(img,kernel,iterations = 1)
closing = cv.morphologyEx(img, cv.MORPH_CLOSE, kernel)
Full documentation here.