Morphological image processing methodologies

ABSTRACTThe word morphology commonly denotes a branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of animals and plants. We use the same word in this MS thesis, in the context of mathematical morphology as a tool for extracting image components.The language of mathematical morphology is set theory. As such, morphology offers a unified and powerful approach to numerous image processing problems. Sets in mathematical morphology represent objects in an image. In this MS thesis we will develop and illustrate several important concepts in mathematical morphology. In order to achieve this, cover some preliminary concepts of set theory and logic operations will be covered, then image processing methods such as erosion, dilation, opening, closing will be covered for binary and gray-scale images.The material in this MS thesis begins a transition from a focus on purely image processing methods, whose input and output are images, to processes in which the inputs are images, but the outputs are attributes extracted from those images. Tools like morphology and related concepts are a cornerstone of the mathematical foundation that is utilized for extracting "meaning" from an image.Keywords: Morphological image processing, erosion, dilation, filterin, pruning, thining, opening, closing methords, granulometry.