Arithmetic for color image morphological transform

Abstract

Morphology is an importance method in image processing and computer vision technique. Now as we know that morphology has been widely used in grayscale and bi-level image processing, but it is difficult to use in color image processing, for color image has three color components. Applying morphological method on color image may cause color shift in the original image. Morphological image processing method has satisfactory results in noise restraining, image enhancing, image encoding, feature extracting, and texture analyzing. So it is important to find out a method for applying morphological method on color image, and keep the color unchanged at the same time. An approach for color image morphological transform was put forward in this paper. In our approach, we change the color model from RGB space to HIS space first, then applying morphological transform on I component in HSI space and keeping H and S components unchanged, finally using this new I component and two other components (H and S) to obtain color image in RGB space. In this paper we define some new color morphological operators for color image morphological transform, and their characters were also discussed. Experimental results were also explained in the paper. Color morphological transform is a prolonging application of morphology in color space. We find it is an effective means in image processing and feature extracting of target shape.