Objects Counting

Hi!

Currently, I'm working in a people counting project.

As a start, I want to make a program where given this image of a group of coins:

one can authomaticaly count how many coins are there in the image.

With some matrix manipulation, I've issolated the coin borders:

And now I want to know if someone can help me in counting how many of these round blobs is there in my image. That is, the program that I want to create must tell me: "there is 10 objects in the image"

Any ideas?

thanks.