Some applications of mathematical morphology to range imagery

Although little known, mathematical morphology (MM) offers great potential in the areas of image enhancement, feature extraction, and object recognition. MM has the intrinsic ability to quantitatively analyze object shapes in both 2 and 3 dimensions. Using MM to extract features and recognize objects in range imagery seems particularly appropriate since range data is a natural source of shape information. We present several experimental results of applying MM techniques to real and synthetic range imagery, both for noise removal and feature extraction.