Digital Image

Processing 2k17BSCS CE-321

Lecture 7
Morphological Image Processing
Morphological Image Processing
• The word morphology commonly denotes a branch of biology that
deals with the form and structure of animals and plants.
• We use the same word here in the context of mathematical
morphology as a tool for extracting image components that are useful
in the representation and description of region shape, such as
boundaries, skeletons, and the convex hull.
• We are interested also in morphological techniques for pre- or
postprocessing, such as morphological filtering, thinning, and pruning.

In mathematics, the convex hull or convex envelope or convex closure of a set X of points in the

Euclidean plane or in a Euclidean space (or, more generally, in an affine space over the reals) is
the smallest convex set that contains X
Structuring Elements
• structuring elements (SEs): small sets or subimages used to probe an
image under study for properties of interest.
 Example (How SE works on an image)
• Create a new set by running B over A so that the origin of B visits every
element of A. At each location of the origin of B if B is completely contained in
A, mark that location as a member of the new set (shown shaded); else mark it
as not being a member of the new set (shown not shaded).
• Eroded image is the result

B is completely contained in A means that A and B are completely overlapping

Erosion and Dilation
• We begin the discussion of morphology by studying two operations
• Erosion
• Dilation
• These operations are fundamental to morphological processing.
• In fact, many of the morphological algorithms discussed in this
chapter are based on these two primitive operations
Erosion
A⊖B
Erosion
 Dilation
• A⊕B
• Reverse process of
Erosion
• The element is
marked in output
when SE is
overlapping
partially or
completely.
 Example
• One of the simplest
applications of
dilation is for
bridging gaps.
• Fig shows the same
image with broken
characters that we
studied in
• The maximum
length of the
breaks is known to
be two pixels.
Opening and Closing
Opening generally smoothes the contour of an object, breaks narrow
isthmuses, and eliminates thin protrusions.
A o B = ( A⊖B ) ⊕ B

Closing also tends to smooth sections of contours but, as opposed to

opening, it generally fuses narrow breaks and long thin gulfs,
eliminates small holes, and fills gaps in the contour.


A . B=(A⊕B)⊖B
Opening
Closing
Opening
Closing
The Hit-or-Miss Transformation
• The morphological hit-or-miss transform is a basic tool for shape
detection
• This concept is introduced with the aid of Fig. 9.12, which shows a set
consisting of three shapes (subsets), denoted C, D and E
• The shading in Figs. 9.12(a) through (c) indicates the original sets,
whereas the shading in Figs. 9.12(d) and (e) indicates the result of
morphological operations.
• The objective is to find the location of one of the shapes, say,D.
Boundary Extraction
• The boundary of a set A
denoted by β(A) can be
obtained by first eroding A by
B and then performing the set
difference between A and its
erosion. Where B is suitable
structuring element.
β(A) = A - (A ⊖
B)
Boundary Extraction
Hole Filling
• A hole may be defined as a background region surrounded by a
connected border of foreground pixels.
• To develop an algorithm based on dilation, complementation, and
intersection for filling holes in an image.
• Let A denote a set whose elements are 8-connected boundaries, each
boundary enclosing a background region (i.e., a hole).
• Given a point in each hole, the objective is to fill all the holes with 1s.
Hole Filling
• We begin by forming an array, X0 , of 0s (the same size as the array
containing A), except at the locations in corresponding to the given
point in each hole, which we set to 1.
• Then, the following procedure fills all the holes with 1s