First, you should use gray scale image.
Second you have a large white margin in your data (which is not seen from imshow). You can see the margin if you use imagesc instead.
If you need to count the white pixels inside. You can clip the image to remove the white margin first.
filename = 'https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/uploaded_files/996375/image.jpeg';
I = imread(filename);
I = rgb2gray(I);
figure, imagesc(I); colorbar; %imshow(I);
sum(I(:) >= 250)
sum(I(200:600, 200:600)>250, 'all')
figure; histogram(I(:))
%whos
filename = 'https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/uploaded_files/996380/image.jpeg';
I = imread(filename);
I = rgb2gray(I);
figure, imagesc(I); colorbar; %imshow(I);
figure; histogram(I(:))
sum(I(:) >= 250)
sum(I(200:600, 200:600)>250, 'all')
