yes，sir，what is leaves，is it the bigger area，may be use image segment，such as
im = imread('https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/uploaded_files/1004330/image.jpeg');
im = imcrop(im, [210 125 540 350]);
bw = im2bw(im);
bw2 = bwareaopen(bw, 100);
stats = regionprops(bw2);
figure; imshow(im); hold on;
for i = 1 : length(stats)
hold on; rectangle('position', stats(i).BoundingBox, 'EdgeColor', 'g', 'LineWidth', 2)
cen = stats(i).Centroid;
text(cen(1), cen(2), num2str(i), 'Color', 'r');
end
title(sprintf('total number is %d', length(stats)));
