Architecture for computational mathematical morphology

We present a real-time, compact architecture for translation-invariant windowed nonlinear discrete filters represented in computational mathematical morphology (CMM). The architecture enables filter values to be computed in a deterministic number of operations and thus can be pipelined. Memory requirements are proportional to the size of the filter basis. A filter is implemented by three steps: 1) each component of a vector observation is used as an index into a table of bit vectors; 2) all retrieved bit vectors are "ANDed" together; and 3) the position of the unique nonzero bit is used as an index to a table of filter values. We motivate and describe CMM and illustrate the architecture through examples. We also formally analyze the representation upon which the architecture rests. A modification of the basic architecture provides for increasing filters.