Optimal decomposition of morphological structuring elements

We propose a method of optimal morphological decomposition. We first formulate this kind of problem into a set of linear constraints, and then find out the solution to the set of linear constraints by using an integer linear programming technique. Our method has the following three advantages: (1) the size of the factors can be any n/spl times/n (n/spl ges/3), (2) it can be applied to both convex and concave simply-connected images; (3) optimality is selective and flexible.