Using mature point to speed up binary morphological algorithms

In this paper, mature point, which is either 0 or 1 depending on erosion or dilation operation for binary images, is used to speed up binary morphological algorithms. Whenever the mature point of a particular searching area at coordinates (i,j) has been reached, the morphological operation performed on that area is stopped and moved forward to new coordinates. Two algorithms are tested. They are the bitmap representation algorithm proposed by Boomgaard and Balen [1992] and the overlapping search algorithm recently proposed by Lam and Li [to be published]. Experiment shows that significant computation saving can be realized with the use of mature point even for a small structuring element and small percentage of mature points in the image.