Question: I have an image of connected components(circles filled).If i want to segment them i can use watershed algorithm.I prefer writing my own function for watershed instead of using the inbuilt function in OPENCV.I have successfu How do i find the regionalmax of objects using opencv?

Answer: 
The following listing is a function similar to Matlab's "imregionalmax". It looks for at most **nLocMax** local maxima above **threshold**, where the found local maxima are at least **minDistBtwLocMax** pixels apart. It returns the actual number of local maxima found. Notice that it uses OpenCV's **minMaxLoc** to find global maxima. It is "opencv-self-contained" except for the (easy to implement) function **vdist**, which computes the (euclidian) distance between points (r,c) and (row,col).

**input** is one-channel CV\_32F matrix, and **locations** is nLocMax (rows) by 2 (columns) CV\_32S matrix.

```html
int imregionalmax(Mat input, int nLocMax, float threshold, float minDistBtwLocMax, Mat locations)
{
    Mat scratch = input.clone();
    int nFoundLocMax = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < nLocMax; i++) {
        Point location;
        double maxVal;
        minMaxLoc(scratch, NULL, &maxVal, NULL, &location);
        if (maxVal > threshold) {
            nFoundLocMax += 1;
            int row = location.y;
            int col = location.x;
            locations.at<int>(i,0) = row;
            locations.at<int>(i,1) = col;
            int r0 = (row-minDistBtwLocMax > -1 ? row-minDistBtwLocMax : 0);
            int r1 = (row+minDistBtwLocMax < scratch.rows ? row+minDistBtwLocMax : scratch.rows-1);
            int c0 = (col-minDistBtwLocMax > -1 ? col-minDistBtwLocMax : 0);
            int c1 = (col+minDistBtwLocMax < scratch.cols ? col+minDistBtwLocMax : scratch.cols-1);
            for (int r = r0; r <= r1; r++) {
                for (int c = c0; c <= c1; c++) {
                    if (vdist(Point2DMake(r, c),Point2DMake(row, col)) <= minDistBtwLocMax) {
                        scratch.at<float>(r,c) = 0.0;
                    }
                }
            }
        } else {
            break;
        }
    }
    return nFoundLocMax;
}
```
I had the same problem some time ago, and the solution was to reimplement the imregionalmax algorithm in OpenCV/Cpp. It is not that complicated, because you can find the C++ source code of the function in the Matlab distribution. (somewhere in toolbox). All you have to do is to read carefully and understand the algorithm described there. Then rewrite it or remove the matlab-specific checks and you'll have it.