Unit 5. Geometrical Processes I: Morphology

Segmentation of an image is a process of finding any blobs or determining regions of interest in a certain context. The context may be simple, such as graylevel only, or more complex such as graylevel, closeness and on the same side of an edge. Before any segmentation is done, processes of contrast stretching, histogram equalization, despeckling and light smoothing or other noise removal can be helpful because noise can affect the process of decomposing the image into segments. Segmentation is used increasingly in computer vision, where machine systems use a video camera (or x-ray machine, laser, radar sonar or infrared sensor devices) and an algorithm to find objects and perhaps their spatial orientation from captured images. Applications include inspection of metal objects for cracks, target detection, identification and orientation of parts, contamination in boxes of material, classification of crop fields from satellite images, determining tissue type (bone, fluid, gray and white matter) in brain scans, etc.