Morphological image processing and its parallel implementation

No sequential computer can meet processing demands today. One of the few options for meeting the computation needs is to exploit parallel processing. Morphological image processing algorithms are utilized in many machine vision systems because it is a very powerful image processing tool. Morphology analyses the images from the perspective of set theory and geometry. In this paper, considering the practical restriction of the resources, we proposed a multi-processor architecture for morphological image processing. The architecture is simulated on a HP9000 series 700 workstation. The basic morphological operations such as dilation, erosion and algorithms such as edge detection can be easily and effectively implemented with the proposed architecture. Experimental results indicate that the architecture is robust. We also describe an application of morphological image processing based on this parallel architecture, i.e., marking and counting objects.