Adaptive morphological filter for image processing
Fulin Cheng, A.N. Venetsanopoulos · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1991
A new opening operation (NOP) and a new closing operation (NCP) are introduced and the algorithms to effectively compute the NOP and the NCP are developed. Based on the NOP and the NCP algorithms, an adaptive morphological filter is constructed. The filter adapts to the change of the image features in a way that it finds the optimal shape of the local structuring element of the filter according to the local features of the image. The shape can be any connected shape of a given size, which is considered the best to preserve the local details of the image. In that way, the filter can preserve any details larger or equal to the given mask size and remove those of smaller size. The local computational complexity of the filter changes according to the complexity of the local features of the image. Experiments have shown that the overall computational complexity of the proposed adaptive morphological filter is comparable to that of the nonadaptive one combining four 1-D structuring elements of the same size.