Gray-scale structuring element decomposition

Efficient implementation of morphological operations requires the decomposition of structuring elements into the dilation of smaller structuring elements. Zhuang and Haralick (1986) presented a search algorithm to find optimal decompositions of structuring elements in binary morphology. We use the concepts of Top of a set and Umbra of a surface to extend this algorithm to find an optimal decomposition of any arbitrary gray-scale structuring element.