Morphological Filtering Principles

In the last fifty years, approximately, advances in computers and the availability of images in digital form have made it possible to process and to analyze them in automatic (or semi-automatic) ways. Alongside with general signal processing, the discipline of image processing has acquired a great importance for practical applications as well as for theoretical investigations. Some general image processing references are (Castleman, 1979) (Rosenfeld & Kak, 1982) (Jain, 1989) (Pratt, 1991) (Haralick & Shapiro, 1992) (Russ, 2002) (Gonzalez & Woods, 2006). Mathematical Morphology, which was founded by Serra and Matheron in the 1960s, has distinguished itself from other types of image processing in the sense that, among other aspects, has focused on the importance of shapes. The principles of Mathematical Morphology can be found in numerous references such as (Serra, 1982) (Serra, 1988) (Giardina & Dougherty, 1988) (Schmitt & Mattioli, 1993) (Maragos & Schafer, 1990) (Heijmans, 1994) (Soille, 2003) (Dougherty & Lotufo, 2003) (Ronse, 2005).