Parallel Implementation of Sequential Morphological Filters

Jan Bartovsky (1) , Petr Dokládal (2) , Eva Dokladalova (1) , Vjaceslav Georgiev (3)

1 LIGM - Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard-Monge
2 CMM - Centre de Morphologie Mathématique
3 KAE - FEL ZCU

Many useful morphological filters are built as more or less long concatenations of erosions and dilations: openings, closings, size distributions, sequential filters, etc. An efficient implementation of such concatenation would allow all the sequentially concatenated operators run simultaneously, on the time-delayed data. A recent algorithm (see below) for the morphological dilation/erosion allows such inter-operator parallelism. This paper introduces an additional, intra-operator level of parallelism in this dilation/erosion algorithm. Realized in a dedicated hardware, for rectangular structuring elements with programmable size, such an implementation allows to obtain previously unachievable, real-time performances for these traditionally costly operators. Low latency and memory requirements are the main benefits when the performance is not deteriorated even for long concatenations or high-resolution images.

Domaines: Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]

Jan Bartovsky, Petr Dokládal, Eva Dokladalova, Vjaceslav Georgiev. Parallel Implementation of Sequential Morphological Filters. Journal of Real-Time Image Processing, 2011, to appear (-), pp.1-13. ⟨10.1007/s11554-011-0226-5⟩. ⟨hal-00786367⟩