title: Counting colonies on a Petri dish
body: <p>I have a bunch of Petri dishes full of dots which I'd like to count in Matlab.  Can this be done reliably and in batches?</p>
  
  <p>E.g.  This plate has 352 colonies</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/TiLS3.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>I've tried ImageJ but need to do quite a bit of cropping out of the border and get variable results.</p>
  
  <p>Do you have any suggestions?</p>