MMACH - A MATHEMATICAL MORPHOLOGY TOOLBOX FOR THE KHOROS SYSTEM

Mathematical morphology is a general theory that studies the decomposi tion of operators between complete lattices in terms of some families of simple operators: dilations, erosions antidilations, and antierosio ns. Nowadays, this theory is largely used in image processing and comp uter vision to extract information from images. The KHOROS system is a n open and general environment for image processing and visualization that has become very popular. One of the main characteristics of KHORO S is ifs flexibility, since it runs on standard machines, supports sev eral standard data formats, uses a Visual programming language, and ha s tools to help the users to build in and install their own programs. A set of new programs can be organized as a subsystem called a toolbox . We present MMach, a fast and comprehensive mathematical morphology t oolbox for the KHOROS system dealing with 1-D and 2-0 gray-scale and b inary images. Each program that is applicable to gray-scale and binary images has specialized algorithms for each of these data types, and t hese algorithms are chosen automatically according to the input data. Several examples illustrate applications of the toolbox in image analy sis. (C) 1998 SPIE and IS&T. [S1017-9909(98)01701-2].