Morphological carving

摘要

Irrelevant minima of an image are usually suppressed by a minima imposition technique based on a morphological reconstruction by erosion. In this paper, we present an alternative approach whereby each irrelevant minimum is discarded by creating a descending path linking it to the nearest point having a lower elevation value. This is achieved by carving the image intensity values along the detected path. An enhanced algorithm for the lower complete transformation enabling the definition of flow directions on flat zones is also described.