Segmenting wood chips in an image
It's a tough problem!

What's the exact meaning of recognize the wood chips in this case please?

Assuming you want to separate the wood from the container, I would propose the following processing pipe-line:


for pre-processing, bilateral filtering is a good choice if it fits in your time budget since it will preserve the edges
detect the enclosing circle by using a generalized Hough transform. If you implement your process with OpenCV, you don't even need to compute the gradient of the image before
inside the container, apply some local contrast enhancement to get information up to the borders
compute the image gradient inside the container, and finally segment it based on the gradient orientation (I can't really guess a better clue for segmenting the different chips inside).


Hope this helps...