Morphological image processing techniques are useful for extracting image components that are useful in representing and describing region shapes. The filters can be described using set theoretic notation and implemented using simple computer algorithms based on these. Almost all the material in this chapter has been taken from Digital image processing (Gonzalez and Woods, 1993).
In set theory notation a 2D image is said to be a member of tex2html_wrap_inline6473 . For simplicity we assume that the images are gray-scale images with their intensity being an integer in the range [0,255]. In the following description we consider only two gray levels viz. 0 and 255 which correspond to white and black respectively (it is then called a binary image and belongs to tex2html_wrap_inline6475 ). However, all the discussion extends easily to discrete as well as continuous gray-scale images.