Vector Ordering and Morphological Operations for Colour Image Processing: Fundamentals and Applications

: The extension of concepts of greyscale morphology to colour image processing requires the use of a proper ordering of vectors (colours) and the definitions of infimum and supremum operators in an appropriate colour space. In this paper, a new approach to colour image morphology is proposed. It is based on a new ordering of vectors in the HSV colour space that is partial ordering. The proposed approach is hue preserving, and it is not a component-wise technique. Its basic characteristic is that it is compatible to the standard greyscale morphology: its fundamental and secondary operations possess the same basic properties as their greyscale counterparts, and furthermore, it is identical to greyscale morphology when it is applied to greyscale images. Examples that illustrate the application of the defined operations to colour images are provided. Moreover, the usefulness of the new method in various colour image processing applications, such as colour image edge detection, object recognition, vector top-hat filtering and skeleton extraction, is demonstrated. Received: 14 July 2000, Received in revised form: 24 April 2001, Accepted: 19 June 2001