Previous studies on image processing techniques for panicle size measurement usually have focused on a single panicle or weakly overlapped particles. In the present work, the image processing algorithm for particle size measurement has been improved to process heavily-overlapped spherical-particle images. The algorithm consists of two steps; detection of boundaries which separate the images of the overlapped panicles from the background and the panicle identification process. For the first step, Sobel operator (using gray-level gradient) and the thinning process was adopted, and compared with the gray-level thresholding method that has been widely adopted. In the second, Hough transform was used. Hough transform is the detection algorithm of parametric curves such as straight lines or circles which can be described by several parameters. To reduce the measurement error, the process of finding the true center was added. The improved algorithm was tested by processing an image frame which contains heavily overlapped spherical panicles. The results showed that both the performances of detecting the overlapped images and separating the panicle from them were improved.