Morphological Amoebas Research Articles

Edge detection based on morphological amoebas

Detecting the edges of objects within images is critical for quality image processing. We present an edge-detection technique that uses morphological amoebas that adjust their shape based on variation in image contours. We evaluate the method both quantitatively and qualitatively for edge detection of images, and compare it to classic morphological methods. Our amoeba-based edge-detection system performed better than the classic edge detectors.

Salience Adaptive Structuring Elements

Spatially adaptive structuring elements adjust their shape to the local structures in the image, and are often defined by a ball in a geodesic distance or gray-weighted distance metric space. This paper introduces salience adaptive structuring elements as spatially variant structuring elements that modify not only their shape, but also their size according to the salience of the edges in the image. Morphological operators with salience adaptive structuring elements shift edges with high salience to a less extent than those with low salience. Salience adaptive structuring elements are less flexible than morphological amoebas and their shape is less affected by noise in the image. Consequently, morphological operators using salience adaptive structuring elements have better properties .

Morphological Amoebas Are Self-snakes

This paper is concerned with amoeba median filtering, a structure-adaptive morphological image filter. It has been introduced by Lerallut et al. in a discrete formulation. Experimental evidence shows that iterated amoeba median filtering leads to segmentation-like results that are similar to those obtained by self-snakes, an image filter based on a partial differential equation. We establish this correspondence by analysing a space-continuous formulation of iterated amoeba median filtering. We prove that in the limit of vanishing radius of the structuring elements, iterated amoeba median filtering indeed approximates the partial differential equation of self-snakes. This result holds true under very general assumptions on the metric used to construct the amoebas. We present experiments with discrete iterated amoeba median filtering that confirm qualitative and quantitative predictions of our analysis.