An application of fuzzy morphology for enhancement of aerial images

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach for structure based separation of image objects using fuzzy morphology for aerial images. With set operators in fuzzy context, we apply an adaptive alpha-cut morphological processing for edge detection and image enhancement. A Top-hat transform is first applied to the input image and the resulting image is thresholded to a binary form. The image is then thinned using hit-or-miss transform. Finally, m-connectivity is used to keep the desired number of connected pixels. The output image is overlaid on the original for enhanced boundaries. Experiments were performed on a variety of aerial images. A comparison to other edge enhancement techniques like Sobel Log and Canny filtering shows improved performance by the proposed technique.