Morphological Operations

Morphological operations are erosion and dilation of an image.

Erosion sets each output pixel to the minimum of the corresponding input pixel and its 8 neighboring pixels in the input image. After erosion, light objects on a dark background become smaller (or thinner).

Dilation sets each output pixel to the maximum of the corresponding input pixel and its 8 neighboring pixels. Dilation makes light objects on a dark background bigger (or thicker).

In the Intel® Image Processing Library, the functions iplErode() and iplDilate() can perform one or more iterations of erosion/dilation at a time. The library's morphological functions also include iplOpen() and iplClose(). The function iplOpen() performs several iterations of erosion followed by the same number of dilations. Similarly, iplClose() performs several dilations followed by the same number of erosions.