Locality and adjacency stability constraints for morphological connected operators

This paper investigates two constraints for the connected operator class. For binary images, connected operators are those that treat grains and pores of the input in an all or nothing way, and therefore they do not introduce discontinuities. The first constraint, called connected-component (c.c.) locality, constrains the part of the input that can be used for computing the output of each grain and pore. The second, called adjacency stability, establishes an adjacency constraint between connected components of the input set and those of the output set. Among increasing operators, usual morphological filters can satisfy both requirements. On the other hand, some (non-idempotent) morphological operators such as the median cannot have the adjacency stability property. When these two requirements are applied to connected and idempotent morphological operators, we are lead to a new approach to the class of filters by reconstruction. The important case of translation invariant operators and the relationships between translation invariance and connectivity are studied in detail. Concepts are developed within the binary (or set) framework; however, conclusions apply as well to flat non-binary (gray-level) operators.