Morphological operators for image and video compression

This paper deals with the use of some morphological tools for image and video coding. Mathematical morphology can be considered as a shape-oriented approach to signal processing, and some of its features make it very useful for compression. Rather than describing a coding algorithm, the purpose of this paper is to describe some morphological tools that have recently proved to be attractive for compression. Four sets of morphological transformations are presented: connected operators, the region-growing version of the watershed, the geodesic skeleton, and a morphological interpolation technique. Their implementation will be discussed, and we will show how they can be used for image and video segmentation, contour coding, and texture coding.