Structuring element

About: Structuring element is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 997 publications have been published within this topic receiving 26839 citations.

High-speed architectures for morphological image processing

Abstract: This paper presents a dual architecture for the high-speed realization of basic morphological operations. Since mor-phological filtering can be described as a combination of erosion and dilation, two basic building blocks are required for therealization of any morphological filter. Architectures for the two basic units, namely the erosion unit and the dilation unit,are proposed and studied in terms of cycle time, hardware complexity, and cost. These basic units are similar in structure tothe systolic array architecture used in the implementation of linear digital filters. Correspondingly, the proposed units arehighly modular and are suitable for efficient VLSI implementation. These basic units allow the processing of either binary or gray-scale images. They are particularly suitable for applications in robotics, where speed, size and cost are of critical importance. 1. INTRODUCTION Image processing and analysis based on mathematical morphology has been an active research area in recent years[1,2]. The strength of mathematical morphology lies in its natural coupling between the shape of the image under investiga-tion and the structuring element. That is, by carefully selecting a suitable structuring element, morphological operations canbe used for image filtering such as noise removal andimage smoothing. Mathematical morphology can also be used as an

A Spatially Variant, Locally Adaptive, Background Normalization Operator

Abstract: This paper describes a spatially variant, locally adaptive, background normalization operator that is defined in terms of morphological openings and closings. The variable opening (and closing) residue operators address the problems that can occur when one attempts to choose a single structuring element size for background normalization purposes, in cases where the objects of interest have multiple or unknown widths. The operators attempt to assign a natural width to each pixel in an image, based on the opening or closing size that causes the largest change in its value. This size then also determines a local contrast value for that pixel. The size, local contrast and original grey values of pixels in an image can be used to cluster pixels as an aid to performing image segmentation, or foreground-background discrimination. This paper describes and illustrates the algorithm, and discusses how its outputs may be used for image analysis and parameter selection.

Control of variable structure elements in adaptive mathematical morphology for boundary enhancement of ultrasound images

Abstract: This paper discusses boundary enhancement function for adaptive morphology using variable structuring elements. The mechanism for boundary enhancement is quantitatively described. A method is proposed for setting the definition domain for the structuring elements and controlling their values, which is effective regarding boundary enhancement and speckle reduction in ultrasound images. It is shown that by controlling the value of the structuring element so that it is large near the boundary and small in other areas of the image, boundary enhancement and speckle elimination can be performed simultaneously, using the opening operation and closing operation. The spatial resolution and statistical properties of the speckle intensity in the ultrasound image are utilized to set these functions automatically on the basis of information on the object image. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by a quantitative evaluation of a numerical phantom created in a computer simulation and in an application to boundary extraction from a real biological ultrasound image. It is shown that the performance of the proposed method in speckle reduction and boundary enhancement is better than that of the conventional method. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 87(11): 20–33, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20117

Mathematical morphology and spatial relationships: quantitative, semi-quantitative and symbolic settings

Abstract: Basic mathematical morphology operations rely mainly on local information, based on the concept of structuring element. But mathematical morphology also deals with more global and structural information since several spatial relationships can be expressed in terms of morphological operations (mainly dilations). The aim of this paper is to show that this framework allows to represent in a unified way spatial relationships in various settings: a purely quantitative one if objects are precisely defined, a semi-quantitative one if objects are imprecise and represented as spatial fuzzy sets, and a qualitative one, for reasoning in a logical framework about space. This is made possible thanks to the strong algebraic structure of mathematical morphology, that finds equivalents in set theoretical terms, fuzzy operations and logical expressions.

Highly Accurate Schemes for PDE-Based Morphology with General Convex Structuring Elements

Abstract: The two fundamental operations in morphological image processing are dilation and erosion. These processes are defined via structuring elements. It is of practical interest to consider a variety of structuring element shapes. The realisation of dilation/erosion for convex structuring elements by use of partial differential equations (PDEs) allows for digital scalability and subpixel accuracy. However, numerical schemes suffer from blur by dissipative artifacts. In our paper we present a family of so-called flux-corrected transport (FCT) schemes that addresses this problem for arbitrary convex structuring elements. The main characteristics of the FCT-schemes are: (i) They keep edges very sharp during the morphological evolution process, and (ii) they feature a high degree of rotational invariance. We validate the FCT-scheme theoretically by proving consistency and stability. Numerical experiments with diamonds and ellipses as structuring elements show that FCT-schemes are superior to standard schemes in the field of PDE-based morphology.