Salience Adaptive Structuring Elements

Spatially adaptive structuring elements adjust their shape to the local structures in the image, and are often defined by a ball in a geodesic distance or gray-weighted distance metric space. This paper introduces salience adaptive structuring elements as spatially variant structuring elements that modify not only their shape, but also their size according to the salience of the edges in the image. Morphological operators with salience adaptive structuring elements shift edges with high salience to a less extent than those with low salience. Salience adaptive structuring elements are less flexible than morphological amoebas and their shape is less affected by noise in the image. Consequently, morphological operators using salience adaptive structuring elements have better properties .