Structuring element

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

Fast binary and gray-scale mathematical morphology on VLIW media processors

Abstract: Mathematical morphology has proven to be useful for solving a variety of image processing problems and plays a key role in certain time-critical machine vision applications. The large computation requirement for morphology poses a challenge for microprocessors to support in real time, and often hardwired solutions such as ASICs and EPLDs have been necessary. This paper present a method to implement binary and gray-scale morphology algorithm sufficiently on programmable VLIW mediaprocessors. Efficiency is gained by (1) mapping the algorithms to the mediaprocessor's parallel processing units, (2) avoiding redundant computations by converting the structuring element into a unique lookup table, and (3) minimizing the I/O overhead by using an on- chip programmable DMA controller. Using our approach, 'C' implementation of gray-scale dilation takes 7.0 ms and binary dilation takes 1.2 ms on a 200 MHz MAP1000 mediaprocessor, and more than 35 times faster than that reported for general-purpose microprocessors. With comparable performance to ASIC implementations and the flexibility of a programmable processor, this real-time image computing with mediaprocessors will be more widely used in machine vision and other imaging applications in the future.

Soft Mathematical Morphology: Extensions, Algorithms, and Implementations

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses recent trends in soft mathematical morphology. In this approach, the definitions of the standard morphological operations are slightly relaxed in such a way that a degree of robustness is achieved while most of the desirable properties of the operations are maintained. Soft morphological filters are less sensitive to additive noise and to small variations in object shape than standard morphological filters. They have found applications mainly in noise removal in areas such as medical imaging and digital television. In soft morphological operations, the maximum and the minimum operations used in standard gray-scale morphology are replaced by weighted order statistics. A weighted order statistic is a certain element of a list whose members have been ordered. Some of the members of the original unsorted list participate with a weight greater than 1—that is, they are repeated more than once before sorting. In soft mathematical morphology, the structuring element B is divided into two subsets: (1) the core B 1 and (2) the soft boundary B 2 .

Method and apparatus for efficient computation of morphology operations

Abstract: Disclosed is an algorithm for applying a morphological operation to an image. In one embodiment, the morphological operation is iteratively applied to a focal pixel of the image and to another pixel of the image. The other pixel is located at an offset with respect to the focal pixel. The offset is based on an operation count. In another embodiment, the algorithm includes performing a morphological operation on an image using a convex structuring element. A work structuring element having dimensions corresponding to the outer-most dimensions of the convex structuring element is iteratively applied to the image. The dimensions of the work structuring element are then adjusted to correspond to the remaining outer dimensions of the convex structuring element not yet covered by the previous work structuring element. The applying and adjusting steps are repeated until a predetermined number of morphological operations have been performed.

Supervised method for cell counting from bright field focus stacks

Abstract: We present a novel method for cell counting using bright field focus stacks. Our method is based on the use of supervised learning and out-of-focus appearance of cells. Logistic regression was used for classification with intensity values of 25 focal planes as features. Binary erosion with a large circular structuring element was applied as post-processing step. With this simple method we obtained mean F\-score of 0.87 for cell counting with 12 test images, including images of extremely dense populations. The most important features were obtained from out-of-focus images. Thus, we conclude that using several focal planes provides valuable intensity information for cell counting from bright field microscopy.

Pretopological operators for gray-level image analysis

Abstract: This paper deals with new operators for gray-level image analysis. These operators are based on concepts of pretopology and they extend mathematical morphology operators. Instead of using one structuring element, these new operators use a basis of several structuring elements. If this basis is composed of only one element, these operators are equivalent to mathematical mor- phology ones. This article presents the pretopological representation space and four pretopological structures of operators. Relations between these new operators and the corresponding morpholog- ical operators are described and compared. Properties and examples are displayed.