Digital Image Processing &

Computer Vision

Digital Morphology
 Chapter Content
DIGITAL MORPHOLOGY: Connectedness, Binary Operations, Dilation and Erosion, Opening and Closing,
Grey-Level Morphology, Color Morphology.
 

 Morphology
 Form and structure of an object (or) arrangement & interrelations between parts of an object

 Digital Morphology
  A way to describe or analyze the shape of a digital, most often raster object.

 Language (Linguistics) -- study of structure of words

 Biology -- Shape of an organism

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Morphology (An Example)

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 Digital Morphology

• Digital Morphology relatively new.

• Mathematical morphology well researched
• Images consist of a set of picture elements (pixels) that collect into groups having a 2D structure(Shape).
• Mathematical operations on the set of pixels
• Erosion
• Dilation

• Type of image (bi-level, grey-level, or color)

• Definition of these operations changes based on the type of image

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• Digital morphology uses the geometry of small connected sets of pixels to accomplish tasks that are
useful in processing regions within images.

• Morphology can count and mark

• connected regions in images
• Can fill In small holes
• Can smooth boundaries

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 Rasterization

• Filling in the interior of a shape by pixels or voxels

• Scan-Conversion / Voxelization in 3D

2D Polygon Binary Picture

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 Binary Pictures

Creation Processing
Connected Components

Take the largest 2 components of the object

 Connected Components

• How many connected components are there in the object?

 Connectivity (2D)

• Two pixels are connected if their squares share: Two connected All pixels
• A common edge pixels connected to x
• 4-connectivity
• A common vertex
x
• 8-connectivity

4-connectivity

8-connectivity
 Connectivity (2D)

• Connected component
• A maximum set of pixels (voxels) in the object or background, such that any two pixels (voxels) are
connected via a path of connected pixels (voxels)

8-connected object 4-connected object

(1 component) (4 components)
 Connectedness

(a) A collection of pixels consisting of four 4-connected regions.

(b) Adding a pixel seems to connect the regions, but does not; now there are five 4-connected regions.
(c) Three 8-connected regions, showing the diagonal connections allowed for 8-regions. There are five 4-regions in
this image.
(d) Setting one pixel to black (the grey one) connects all regions together.

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• Morphology can count and mark connected regions in images
• Can fill in small holes
• Can smooth boundaries

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 Elements of Digital Morphology - Binary Operations

• Binary Morphological operators

• Morphological operators working on bi-level images (black & white pixels)
• Gray-level morphological operators

The effects of a simple binary

dilation one a small object.
(a) Original image. (b)
Dilation of the original by one
pixel. (c)
Dilation of the original by two
pixels (dilation of (b) by one
pixel).

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 Structuring Element

• A collection of non-linear processes which can be applied to an image to remove details smaller than a
certain reference shape

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 Morphological Image Processing

• Morphological operations are defined by moving a structuring element over the binary image to be
modified, in such a way that it is centered over every image pixel at some point. When the structuring
element is centered over a region of the image, a logical operation is performed on the pixels covered by
the structuring element, yielding a binary output.

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• Like convolution kernel, the structuring element can be of any size, and it can contain complements of 1s and 0s.
• At each pixel position, a specified logical operation is performed between the structuring element and the underlying binary image.
• The binary result of that logical operation is stored in the output image at that pixel position.
• The effect created depends upon the size and content of the structuring element and the nature of the logical operation.
• Could be defined in 1, 2, 3 (or higher) dimensions.
If
structuring element is perfectly fit on to the binary image then perform the logical operation;
else
do not perform any operation into resultant binary image pixel

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Set Operations

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Logical Operations

XOR Operation of images A and B

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 Binary Dilation

• Translation
  of the set A by the point x is defined in set notation as:

(A)x = {c | c = a + x, a Є A}
• Reflection of the set A is defined as :
= {c | c = -a, a Є A}
• Complement of the set:

• Intersection of the two sets A and B is the set of elements (pixels) belonging to both A and B:

• Union of the two sets A and B is the set of pixels that belong to either A or B or to both:

• Difference between the set A and set B is: 25

 Dilation

•• Dilation
  is a process in which the binary image is expanded from its original shape.
• Expansion is determined by the structuring element.
• This structuring element is smaller in size compared to the image itself
• A Dilation of the set A by the set B is:

where
A represents the image being operated on,
B is a second set of pixels, a shape that operates on the pixels of A to produce the result.

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• Fills in Holes
• Smoothens object boundaries
• Adds an extra outer ring of pixels onto object boundary,

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• Using the input image and structuring element as given below, find the dilated version of the input
image.

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 Erosion

• Erosion is the counter-process of dilation. If dilation enlarges an image then erosion shrinks the image.
• The structuring element is normally smaller than the image with a 3 × 3 size.
• Faster computation time when compared to larger structuring-element size.
• The erosion process will move the structuring element from left to right and top to bottom.
• At the center position, indicated by the center of the structuring element, the process will look for whether there is a complete overlap with
the structuring element or not.
• If there is no complete overlapping then the center pixel indicated by the center of the structuring element will be set white or 0.

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Set Theory

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 Morphological Operators

Object (A) Structure element (Bx)

Erosion Dilation
 Morphological Operators

• Duality (if the structuring element is symmetric)

• Dilation is equivalent to erosion of the background

Erosion Dilation
Morphological Operators

• Opening (erode, then dilate)

• Union of all structuring elements B contained in A
• Shaves off convex corners and thin spikes

Object (A) Structure element (Bx) Opening

Morphological Operators

• Closing (dilate, then erode)

• Complement of union of structuring elements B outside A
• Equivalent to “opening” the background (because of duality)
• Fills concave corners and thin tunnels

Object (A)
Structure element (Bx)

A  B   
Closing
A B B