Competitive-Coding | algorithmic question of various online judges | Learning library

I have been trying to write a program for some question taken for competitive-coding of Cs-academy site.

The question is as following:

Suppose we were going through a bunch of black and white pictures and all of a sudden, a quirky idea struck to your mind – how many clicks does it take to convert all the white pixels into black and clear out a picture using brushes? So, we scanned and converted several pictures into binary data. Each pixel of the binary pictures are now represented by an integer, 0 for a black pixel and 1 for a white pixel.

To modify a picture, we can only use one of the three brushes each time:

+(plus) - When used, the pixels at the left, top, right and bottom of the current pixel are also colored in the same color.

x(cross) - When used, the pixels at the top-left, top-right, bottom-right and bottom-left of the current pixel are also colored in the same color.

*(star) - When used, all 9 pixels around the current pixel are also colored in the same color.

(Here is an illustration:https://publicmedia1.csacademy.com/public/1507909042-2157482298.png)

Each of these brushes, when used, works recursively. So if you color a pixel, its neighbors will get colored, then the neighbors of the neighbors, and so on.

Our task is to compute the minimum clicks you will have to perform with each brush in order to clear out a picture: First we will have to compute the minimum clicks that are needed to clear the picture using only the + brush, then compute the minimum clicks that are needed to clear the picture using only the x brush and finally compute the minimum clicks that are needed to clear the picture using only the * brush.

Input begins with a single number t (1≤t≤100) which denotes the number of pictures to process. Each test case begins with a line, which contains 2 space-separated integers w and h denoting the width and the height of the picture in pixels (1≤w,h≤1001). Following there will be h lines denoting the w pixel values (either 0 or 1) of each row of the picture.

For each test case output, 3 space separated integers which denote the minimum number of clicks needed to clear out the picture for each of the three brushes: +, x and *.

I wrote a program which calculates recursively - using separate functions - the count for each of 3 options: