General sweep mathematical morphology

General sweep mathematical morphology provides a new class of morphological operations, which allow one to select varying shapes and orientations of structuring elements during the sweeping process. Such a class holds syntactic characteristics similar to algebraic morphology as well as sweep geometric modeling. The conventional morphology is a subclass of the general sweep morphology. The sweep morphological dilation/erosion provides a natural representation of sweep motion in the manufacturing processes, and the sweep opening/closing provides variant degrees of smoothing in image filtering. The theoretical framework for representation, computation and analysis of sweep morphology is presented in this paper. Its applications to the sweeping with deformations, image enhancement, edge linking, and shortest path planning for rotating objects are also discussed. (C) 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.