Adaptive structuring elements based on salience information

Abstract

Adaptive structuring elements modify their shape and size according to the image content and may outperform fixed structuring elements. Without any restrictions, they suffer from a high computational complexity, which is often higher than linear with respect to the number of pixels in the image. This paper introduces adaptive structuring elements that have predefined shape, but where the size is adjusted to the local image structures. The size of adaptive structuring elements is determined by the salience map that corresponds to the salience of the edges in the image, which can be computed in linear time. We illustrate the difference between the new adaptive structuring elements and morphological amoebas. As an example of its usefulness, we show how the new adaptive morphological operations can isolate the text in historical documents. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.