Morphologic edge detection

Abstract

Edge operators based on gray-scale morphologic operations are introduced. These operators can be efficiently implemented in near real time machine vision systems which have special hardware support for gray-scale morphologic operations. The simplest morphologic edge detectors are the dilation residue and erosion residue operators. The underlying motivation for these and some of their combinations are discussed and justified. Finally, the blur-minimum morphologic edge operator is defined. Its inherent noise sensitivity is less than the dilation or the erosion residue operators. Some experimental results are provided to show the validity of these morphologic operators. When compared with the enhancement/thresholding edge detectors and the cubic facet second derivative zero-crossing edge operator, the results show that all the edge operators have similar performance when the noise is small. However, as the noise increases, the second derivative zero-crossing edge operator and the blur-minimum morphologic edge operator have much better performance than the rest of the operators. The advantage of the blur-minimum edge operator is that it is less computationally complex than the facet edge operator.