New morphological operators for color image processing

Morphological image processing is well known as an efficient method in image processing and computer vision. With the wide use of color in many areas, the interest on the color perception and processing has been growing rapidly. In this paper, a new approach to color morphological transformation, as an extension of mathematical morphology from gray-scale image to color image, is proposed based on HSL (hue-saturation-lightness) color space. New basic color morphological operators are first defined, and new composite color morphological operators, including color morphological filters with multiple structuring elements, and color morphological multi-resolution analysis and synthesis, are constructed. Then their properties are discussed. Experimental results show that the proposed color morphological operators can be efficiently used in color image processing, encoding and feature extraction.