Algebraic and PDE Approaches for Lattice Scale-Spaces with Global Constraints

Abstract

This paper begins with analyzing the theoretical connections between levelings on lattices and scale-space erosions on reference semilattices. They both represent large classes of self-dual morphological operators that exhibit both local computation and global constraints. Such operators are useful in numerous image analysis and vision tasks including edge-preserving multiscale smoothing, image simplification, feature and object detection, segmentation, shape and motion analysis. Previous definitions and constructions of levelings were either discrete or continuous using a PDE. We bridge this gap by introducing generalized levelings based on triphase operators that switch among three phases, one of which is a global constraint. The triphase operators include as special cases useful classes of semilattice erosions. Algebraically, levelings are created as limits of iterated or multiscale triphase operators. The subclass of multiscale geodesic triphase operators obeys a semigroup, which we exploit to find PDEs that can generate geodesic levelings and continuous-scale semilattice erosions. We discuss theoretical aspects of these PDEs, propose discrete algorithms for their numerical solution which converge as iterations of triphase operators, and provide insights via image experiments.