Detect circles from chained blobs?

I'm trying to count the number of white dots (crops) using bwlabel and regionprops but I'm having trouble counting large blobs of crops. The script works fine detecting single crops (blue*) but if there are many large plants that are connected (green*), bwlabel counts all the connected plants as one. Is there a way I can separate the zigzag blob into individual elements?

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Either come up with a better segmentation algorithm or else get the area and divide the blob area by the known area of one circle to get the estimated number of circles in that blob.