How to detect a contour or spot on the edge?

Question

I'm trying to detect the black spots on the following image.

I use adaptive thresholding and use find contours in opencv. This method is successful for detecting most of the black spots inside the gray background. However, it's not able to detect the spots on the edges, simply because contour detection thinks the spots are part of the black background, see here:

Here is the code I used to get these contours:

import cv2

image_path = "cropped.png"
img = cv2.imread(image_path)
gray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)

# do adaptive threshold on gray image
thresh = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(gray, 255, cv2.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_MEAN_C, cv2.THRESH_BINARY, 101, 3)

# apply morphology open then close
kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (1, 1))
blob = cv2.morphologyEx(thresh, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, kernel)
kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (10, 10))
blob = cv2.morphologyEx(blob, cv2.MORPH_CLOSE, kernel)

# invert blob
blob = (255 - blob)

# Get contours
cnts, hierarchy = cv2.findContours(blob, cv2.RETR_TREE, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)

result1 = img.copy()
cv2.drawContours(result1, cnts, -1, (0, 0, 255), 3)
cv2.imwrite("_Fail_Blob.png", result1)

Any suggestions on how to detect the black spots on the edges? Eventually looking for an algorithm to be able to output sth like the following:

Answer 1

You can use morphological operations for select spot: By example:

import cv2 
fn = 'IdTPp.jpg'
img = cv2.imread(fn)
img=cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
se=cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (45,45))
img2=cv2.morphologyEx(img, cv2.MORPH_CLOSE, se)
img3=cv2.absdiff(img, img2)
cv2.imshow("detected circles", img3)