Common Names: Thickening
Brief Description
Thickening is a morphological operation that is used to grow selected regions of foreground pixels in binary images, somewhat like dilation or closing. It has several applications, including determining the approximate convex hull of a shape, and determining the skeleton by zone of influence. Thickening is normally only applied to binary images, and it produces another binary image as output.
The thickening operation is related to the hit-and-miss transform, and so it is helpful to have an understanding of that operator before reading on.