title: Finding number of colored shapes from picture using Python
body: <p>My problem has to do with recognising colours from pictures. Doing microbiology I need to count the number of cell nuclei present on a picture taken with a microscope camera. I've used GIMP to tag the nuclei with dots of red colour. Now I'd need to make a script in python, which, given an image, would tell me how many red dots are present. There is no red in the picture except in the dots.</p>
  
  <p>I've thought of a rather complicated solution which is probably not the best one: Take a picture and start iterating through pixels checking each one's colour. If that is red, check all 8 nearest pixels, recursively check each red one's neighbours again until no more neighbouring red pixels are found. Then increment nuclei count by one and mark traversed pixels so they won't be iterated through again. Then continue iteration from where it stopped. Seems kind of heavy so I thought I'd ask, maybe someone has already dealt with a similar problem more elegantly.</p>
  
  <p>Regards,
  Sander</p>