Segmentation of nautical chart components using mathematical morphology

This paper presents some procedures for segmenting nautical charts using concepts of mathematical morphology. The method discussed, based on the multi-angled parallelism, is capable of extracting overlapped connected components such as lakes, isolines, railways, canals, small symbols and strings of characters. The problem of connectivity is solved using geodesic operations. The procedures have been applied to a 1/50000 scale nautical chart of the Brazilian Navy scanned at a resolution of 300 dpi.