Morphological Image Analysis

From reviews of the first edition: "This is a scholarly tour de force through the world of morphological image analysis [...]. I recommend this book unreservedly as the best one I have encountered on this particular topic [...]" BMVA News

Morphological image processing, a standard part of the imaging scientist's toolbox, can be applied to a wide range of industrial applications. Concentrating on applications, this text shows how to analyse the problems and then develop successful algorithms to solve them.

Binary erosion and dilation. Binary opening and closing. Morphological processing of binary images. Hit-or-miss transform. Granulometries. Gray-scale morphology. Gray-scale morphological algorithms.

Mathematical morphology (MM) is a theory for the analysis of spatial structures. It is called morphology since it aims at analysing the shape and form of objects, and it is mathematical in the sense that the analysis is based on set theory, topology, lattice algebra, random functions, etc. MM is not only a theory, but also a powerful image analysis technique. The purpose of the present book is to provide the image analysis community with a snapshot of current theoretical and applied developments of MM. The book consists of forty-five contributions classified by subject. It demonstrates a wide range of topics suited to the morphological approach.

The analysis, processing, evolution, optimization and/or regulation, and control of shapes and images appear naturally in engineering (shape optimization, image processing, visual control), numerical analysis (interval analysis), physics (front propagation), biological morphogenesis, population dynamics (migrations), and dynamic economic theory. These problems are currently studied with tools forged out of differential geometry and functional analysis, thus requiring shapes and images to be smooth. However, shapes and images are basically sets, most often not smooth. J.-P. Aubin thus constructs another vision, where shapes and images are just any compact set. Hence their evolution -- which requires a kind of differential calculus -- must be studied in the metric space of compact subsets. Despite the loss of linearity, one can transfer most of the basic results of differential calculus and differential equations in vector spaces to mutational calculus and mutational equations in any mutational space, including naturally the space of nonempty compact subsets. "Mutational and Morphological Analysis" offers a structure that embraces and integrates the various approaches, including shape optimization and mathematical morphology. Scientists and graduate students will find here other powerful mathematical tools for studying problems dealing with shapes and images arising in so many fields.