Mathematical Morphology And Computer Vision

An algebraic system of operators, such as those of math- ematical morphology, is useful for computer vision because compositions of its operators can be formed which, when their meaningful parts and separate the meaningful parts from their extraneous parts. Such a system of operators and their compositions permit the underlying shapes to be identified and reconstructed as best possible from their distorted noisy forms. As well they permit each shape to be understood in terms of a decomposition, each entity of the decomposition being some suitably simple shape. Since shape is a prime carrier of information in machine vision, there should be little surprise about the importance of mathematical morphology. Morphological operations can simplify image data preserving their essential shape char acteristics and eliminate irrelevancies. As the identification and decomposition of objects, object features, object surface defects, and assembly defects correlate directly with shape, it is only natural that mathematical morphology has an essential structural role to play in machine vision.