Morphological operations by locally variable structuring elements and their applications to region extraction in ultrasound images

A new adaptive morphological operation using variable structuring elements is defined. The level of the structuring element changes, depending on the local region of the processing image. The operations enhance the boundary and are useful for contour extraction of the ambiguous images such as ultrasound ones. The enhancing effect of involving parameters is studied and experimental results from a gelatine phantom mimicking human tissue are also discussed