Introduction to Image Morphology Mathematical Morphology for image processing consists of applying basic set operations to an image.
Minkowski operators consist of a type of addition and a type of subtraction.
Minkowski Addition, also known as Dilation, consists of taking a set known as a structuring element and applying it to each member in the source set. In the continuous case Minkowski addition can be thought of as a way to grow the members of source set by a method of psuedoconvolution. In image processing it is rare to use the continuous case of Minkowski addition, instead the discrete case is used. To implement discrete Minkowski addition, on an image, the structuring element is applied to each pixel in the source image. This either operation is the simple binary OR operation.