Morphological Operators

New in version 0.8: open() & close() were added in version 0.8

Morphological operators were the first operations in mahotas (back then, it was even, briefly, just a single C++ module called morph). Since then, mahotas has grown a lot. This module, too, has grown and acquired more morphological operators as well as being optimised for speed.

Let us first select an interesting image

(Source code, png, hires.png, pdf)

Dilation & Erosion

Dilation and erosion are two very basic operators (mathematically, you only need one of them as you can define the erosion as dilation of the negative or vice-versa).

mahotas.morph.dilate(eye)

Dilation is, intuitively, making positive areas “fatter”:

(Source code, png, hires.png, pdf)

mahotas.morph.erode(eye)

Erosion, by contrast, thins them out:

(Source code, png, hires.png, pdf)

Mahotas supports greyscale erosion and dilation (depending on the dtype of the arguments) and you can specify any structuring element you wish (including non-flat ones). By default, a 1-cross is used:

# if no structure-element is passed, use a cross:
se = np.array([
        [0, 1, 0],
        [1, 1, 1],
        [0, 1, 0]])

However, you can use whatever structuring element you want:

se = np.array([
    [1, 1, 0],
    [1, 1, 1],
    [0, 1, 1]])
dilated = mahotas.morph.dilate(eye, se)
eroded = mahotas.morph.erode(eye, se)

Close & Open

Closing and opening are based on erosion and dilation. Again, they work in greyscale and can use an arbitrary structure element.

Here is closing:

mahotas.morph.close(eye)

(Source code, png, hires.png, pdf)

And here is opening:

mahotas.morph.open(eye)

(Source code, png, hires.png, pdf)

Both close and open take an optional structuring element as a second argument:

mahotas.morph.open(eye, se)