MORPHOLOGICAL TOOLS FOR SEGMENTATION - CONNECTED FILTERS AND WATERSHEDS

The paper makes a sun,ey of the morphological tools which are useful f or image simplification and segmentation. It starts presenting the con nected filters, which have the unique feature to simplify the images w ithout blurring the contours of the remaining objects. Such filters ma y be constructed on several criteria : size, contrast complexity or ty pe of motion. In the case where geometric criteria are used, it is pos sible to base a scale-space description of the images on a series of i ncreasing filters. This is most useful when applied to a gradient imag e : successive filters will progressively fill the valleys of the grad ient image and a watershed transform applied on these images will prod uce segmentations which are coarser and coarser: These segmentations h ave a tree structure : from a finer level to a coarser level, only fus ions rake place.