Circle detection without overlapping

Question

I want to do circle detection under the condition that: overlap circles will be count as 1 circle.

Particularly, when I do circle detection and put the letter \"P\" to e

Answer 1

If I was doing this I wouldn't use HoughCircles but instead try:

1) Smooth, to get rid of some noise
2) Threshold, to produce a binary mask
3) Contour, where each contour is a detected pollen.

Simple but I think it should work.