A new approach to morphological color image processing

This paper presents a new approach to the generalization of the concepts of grayscale morphology to color images. A new vector ordering scheme is proposed, infimum and supremum operators are defined, and the fundamental vector morphological operations are extracted. The basic properties of the presented vector morphology are described and its similarities to grayscale morphological operators are pointed out. The main advantages of the proposed methodology are that is vector preserving and provides improved results in many morphological applications. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed technique in a number of image processing and analysis problems. such as noise removal. edge detection and skeleton extraction. (C) 2002 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.