Erosion and Dilation on 2-D and 3-D Digital Images: A New Size-Independent Approach

This paper presents a new approach to achieve elementary neighborhood operations on both 2D and 3D binary images by using the Extreme Vertices Model (EVM), a recent orthogonal polyhedra representation applied to digital images. The operations developed here are erosion and dilation. In contrast with previous techniques, this method do not use a voxel-based approach but deal with the inner sections of the object. It allows to build an image sizeindependent algorithm. The proposed method also admits the use of structuring elements of arbitrary size and allows to treat 2D and 3D images in identical way using the same algorithm.