Generalized Morphological Operators Applied to Map-Analysis

The concept of strictness of morphological operators is discussed, and it is shown that the ordinary morphological operators have extreme strictness which leads to sensitivity to noise and digital artifacts. Based on this observation new morphological operators that generalize the ordinary morphological operators, are defined. The generalized operators have controllable strictness and so excessive erosion and dilation may be prevented. Some properties of the generalized morphological operators are discussed, and it is shown that they may have a linear filtering interpretation. The paper concludes with some preliminary examples demonstrating the advantages of the generalized morphological operators.