Non-linear pipeline architectures for morphological signal processing

A nonlinear pipeline architecture is proposed for efficient and high-speed implementation of morphological filters. This nonlinear processor is composed of dual architectures or units which implement the two basic morphological transformations: dilation and erosion. Throughput and hardware complexity are analyzed, and comparisons are given for different sizes and gray scales of structuring functions. A decomposition scheme is proposed to facilitate the implementation of morphological filters based on one-dimensional structuring functions constructed using the two standard units. The modularity of this approach provides flexibility in the design of morphological filters and is well suited for VLSI implementation