Morphological operations by locally variable structuring elements and their applications to region extraction in ultrasound images

摘要

In this paper, we define a new adaptive morphological operation, in which the value of a structuring element varies adaptively depending on the local intensity information of the processing image of interest. We prove that the proposed adaptive morphological operation has almost the same mathematical structure and properties as the conventional ones have. There are many useful functions in the method. Among them are the opening and closing, which implement both smoothing of the image and emphasizing of the edges at a time. Conventional opening operation has a smoothing function but not both. Applying our method to relatively unclear images such as ultrasound ones with speckle noise, its usefulness can be found in extracting regions. We also discuss parameter setting, and its enhancement effect together with experimental results is demonstrated.