ABSTRACT

Mathematical morphology was initially developed to analyse the shape and structure of objects [1] in binary images. In particular, it is a useful tool for extracting important components of a binary image, leading to easier image representation and description. Its concepts and mathematical operations, which come through from the set theory, are quite different from the treatises in Chapters 3 and 4. In these chapters, the methods of image processing focus on the intensity functions of the images. Concepts and processing techniques used in mathematical morphology in this chapter are aimed at the use of set operations. Note that these concepts can be extended to handle image preprocessing and image segmentation as described in Chapters 3 and 4. In summary, techniques employed in Chapters 3 and 4 are based on point-spread function and linear transformations such as convolution [2], whereas the basic ingredient in mathematical morphology is set theory.