Applying Iconic Processing in Machine Vision

Shape-based (iconic) approaches play a vital role in the early stages of a computer vision system. Many computer vision applications require only 2-D information about objects. These applications allow the use of techniques that emphasize pictorial or iconic features. In this chapter we present an iconic approach using morphological image processing as a tool for analyzing images to recover 2-D information. We also briefly discuss a special architecture that allows very fast implementation of morphological operators to recover useful information in diverse applications. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach by presenting details of an application. We show that the iconic approach offers features that could simplify many tasks in machine vision systems.