Find and count gear opencv - opencv

Question

I need some help with opencv and gearwheel detection.
My task: count gearwheel teeth from images like this:
Im trying to use HoughCircles method but got bad results lile this:
Otsu threshold:
Code (on openCV Java wrapper):
Mat des = new Mat(sourceImg.rows(), sourceImg.cols(), sourceImg.type());
Imgproc.cvtColor(sourceImg, sourceImg, Imgproc.COLOR_BGR2GRAY, 4);
Imgproc.GaussianBlur(sourceImg,des, new Size(3,3),0,0);
Imgproc.threshold(des, des, 0, 255, Imgproc.THRESH_OTSU | Imgproc.THRESH_OTSU);
Imgproc.Canny(des, des, 0 , 1);
displayImage(Mat2BufferedImage(des));
Mat circles = new Mat();
Imgproc.HoughCircles(des, circles, Imgproc.CV_HOUGH_GRADIENT, 1.0, 50, 70.0, 30.0, 100, 0);
/// Draw the circles detected
for(int i = 0; i < circles.cols(); i++ )
{
double vCircle[] = circles.get(0,i);
if (vCircle == null)
break;
Point pt = new Point(Math.round(vCircle[0]), Math.round(vCircle[1]));
int radius = (int)Math.round(vCircle[2]);
// draw the found circle
Core.circle(des, pt, radius, new Scalar(255,255,255), 3);
Core.circle(des, pt, 3, new Scalar(255,0,0), 3);
}
What is right way for my task? How to count teeth? Thanks for your answers.

Answer 1

Here's what I tried. The code is in C++ but you can easily adapt it to Java.
load the image and resize it to half the size
erode the image, use Canny to detect edges, then dilate to connect the edges
find contours and choose the largest contour
find the convexhull of this largest contour. Number of point in the convexhull will give you a rough value for the number of teeth
Here's the largest contour and the convexhull points:
I get a value of 77 with the following code.
Mat gray = imread("16atchc.jpg", 0);
Mat small, bw, er, kernel;
resize(gray, small, Size(), .5, .5);
kernel = getStructuringElement(MORPH_ELLIPSE, Size(3, 3));
erode(small, er, kernel);
Canny(er, bw, 50, 150);
dilate(bw, bw, kernel);
vector<vector<Point>> contours;
vector<Vec4i> hierarchy;
int imax = 0, areamax = 0;
findContours(bw, contours, hierarchy, CV_RETR_CCOMP, CV_CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE, Point(0, 0));
for(int idx = 0; idx >= 0; idx = hierarchy[idx][0])
{
Rect rect = boundingRect(contours[idx]);
int area = rect.width * rect.height;
if (area > areamax)
{
areamax = area;
imax = idx;
}
}
vector<Point> hull;
convexHull(contours[imax], hull);
cout << contours[imax].size() << ", " << hull.size() << endl;