Introduction

Mathematical morphology (MM) or simply morphology can be defined as a theory for the analysis of spatial structures. It is called morphology because it aims at analysing the shape and form of objects. It is mathematical in the sense that the analysis is based on set theory, integral geometry, and lattice algebra. MM is not only a theory, but also a powerful image analysis technique. The purpose of this book is to provide a detailed presentation of the principles and applications of morphological image analysis. The emphasis is therefore put on the technique rather than the theory underlying MM. Besides, any non-specialist faced with an image analysis problem rapidly realises that a unique image transformation usually fails to solve it. Indeed, most image analysis problems are very complex and can only possibly be solved by a combination of many elementary transformations. In this context, knowledge of the individual image processing operators is a necessary but not sufficient condition to find a solution: guidelines and expert knowledge on the way to combine the elementary transformations are also required. Hence, beyond the presentation of the morphological operators, we will describe many real applications to help the reader acquiring the expert knowledge necessary for building the chain of operators to resolve his/her own image analysis problem.