Pipeline Architectures for Morphologic Image Analysis

The concepts of mathematical morphology provide some very powerful tools with which low-level image analysis can be performed. Low-level analysis, by its very nature, involves repeated computations over large, regular data structures. Parallelism appears to be a necessary attribute of a hardware system which can efficiently perform such image-analysis tasks, and there is a variety of forms that this parallelism can take. This paper gives a tutorial description of the basic morphological transformations and demonstrates how the basic morphological transformations can be implemented in the pipeline processing form of parallelism. Correspondingly, plausible designs for pipeline architectures are developed.