Mathematical Morphology for Color Images: An Image-Dependent Approach

Abstract EN

This paper proposes one possibility to generalize the morphological operations (particularly, dilation, erosion, opening, and closing) to color images.

First, properties of a desirable generalization are stated and a brief review is done on former approaches.

Then, the method is explained, which is based on a total ordering of the colors in an image induced by its color histogram; this is valid for just one image and may present problems in smoothly coloured images.

To solve these drawbacks a refinement consisting of smoothing the histogram and using a joint histogram of several images is presented.

Results of applying the so-defined morphological operations on several sets of images are shown and discussed.