Morphological Area Openings and Closings for Grey-scale Images

The filter that removes from a binary image the components with area smaller than a parameter λ is called area opening. Together with its dual, the area closing, it is first extended to grey-scale images. It is then proved to be equivalent to a maximum of morphological openings with all the connected structuring elements of area greater than or equal to λ. The study of the relationships between these filters and image extrema leads to a very efficient area opening/closing algorithm. Grey-scale area openings and closings can be seen as transformations with a structuring element which locally adapts its shape to the image structures, and therefore have very nice filtering capabilities. Their effect is compared to that of more standard morphological filters. Some applications in image segmentation and hierarchical decomposition are also briefly described.

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