Real-Time Implementation of Morphological Filters with Polygonal Structuring Elements

Jan Bartovsky (1) , Petr Dokládal (2) , Eva Dokladalova (1) , Michel Bilodeau (2) , Mohamed Akil (3)

1 LIGM - Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard-Monge
2 CMM - Centre de Morphologie Mathématique
3 Algorithms, architectures, image analysis and computer graphics

In mathematical morphology, circular structuring elements (SE) are used whenever one needs angular isotropy. The circles - difficult to implement efficiently - are often approximated by convex, symmetric polygons that decompose under the Minkowski addition to 1-D inclined segments. In this paper, we show how to perform this decomposition efficiently, in stream with almost optimal latency to compute gray-scale erosion and dilation by flat regular polygons. We further increase its performance by introducing a spatial parallelism while maintaining sequential access to data. We implement these principles in a dedicated hardware block. Several of these blocks can be concatenated to efficiently compute sequential filters, or granulometries in one scan. With a configurable image size and programmable SE size, this architecture is usable in high-end, real-time industrial applications. We show on an example that it conforms to real-time requirements of the 100Hz 1080p FullHD TV standard, even for serial morphological filters using large hexagons or octagons.

Domaines: Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]

Jan Bartovsky, Petr Dokládal, Eva Dokladalova, Michel Bilodeau, Mohamed Akil. Real-Time Implementation of Morphological Filters with Polygonal Structuring Elements. Journal of Real-Time Image Processing, 2015, 10 (1), pp.175-187. ⟨10.1007/s11554-012-0271-8⟩. ⟨hal-00789845⟩