Decomposition of arbitrary gray-scale morphological structuring elements

Abstract

Mathematical morphology has been widely used for many applications in image processing and analysis. Most image processing architectures adapted to morphological operations use structuring elements of a limited size. Therefore, difficulties arise when we deal with a large-sized structuring element. In this paper, we present algorithms for the decomposition of arbitrary gray-scale structuring elements into combined dilations or maximum operators of smaller structuring components. Our method does not need to perform additional pre-processes, such as checking the type of structuring elements and the decomposition rules. Furthermore, it is suited for a parallel pipelined architecture.