Morphological Operations

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Morphological operations process binary (or grayscale) images using a structuring element \(B\):

• Erosion: removes small protrusions; shrinks foreground.

• Dilation: fills small holes; expands foreground.

• Opening (erosion then dilation): removes small objects.

• Closing (dilation then erosion): fills small holes.

• Watershed: topology-based algorithm for separating touching objects by treating the intensity surface as a landscape and flooding from seed points.

See also

• Thresholding and Binarization — usually run before morphological clean-up

• Connected Components — labelling the regions morphology leaves behind

• Watershed — watershed as a standalone clustering method

• Morphological Post-Processing — these operations applied as a concrete preprocessing step

• Digital Image Processing Basics — every other basics topic