ABSTRACT
The term morphology can be used in linguistics to refer to the study of the structure and form of words, in biology to the study of the form or shape of an organism, in astronomy to the shape of astronomical object or in geography to the study of the shape and structure of land masses and rivers. In the context of image processing, mathematical morphology treats image components as geometrical shapes. Mathematical morphology is concerned with how to identify, represent and process the shapes of objects within a scene. Morphology relies on several branches of mathematics such as discrete geometry, topology, and differential equations and has produced sophisticated and efficient algorithms for such tasks as handwriting analysis, biomedical imaging, and others. The material presented in this chapter begins to move away from the domain of image processing and into the more abstract domain of computer vision.
