Hit-or-miss transform
In mathematical morphology, hit-or-miss transform is an operation that detects a given configuration (or pattern) in a binary image, using the morphological erosion operator and a pair of disjoint structuring elements. The result of the hit-or-miss transform is the set of positions where the first structuring element fits in the foreground of the input image, and the second structuring element misses it completely.
Mathematical definition[]
In binary morphology, an image is viewed as a subset of a Euclidean space or the integer grid , for some dimension d. Let us denote this space or grid by E.
A structuring element is a simple, pre-defined shape, represented as a binary image, used to probe another binary image, in morphological operations such as erosion, dilation, opening, and closing.
Let and be two structuring elements satisfying . The pair (C,D) is sometimes called a composite structuring element. The hit-or-miss transform of a given image A by B=(C,D) is given by:
- ,
where is the set complement of A.
That is, a point x in E belongs to the hit-or-miss transform output if C translated to x fits in A, and D translated to x misses A (fits the background of A).
Some applications[]
Thinning[]
Let , and consider the eight composite structuring elements, composed of:
- and ,
- and
and the three rotations of each by 90°, 180°, and 270°. The corresponding composite structuring elements are denoted .
For any i between 1 and 8, and any binary image X, define
where denotes the set-theoretical difference.
The thinning of an image A is obtained by cyclically iterating until convergence:
Other applications[]
- Pattern detection. By definition, the hit-or-miss transform indicates the positions where a certain pattern (characterized by the composite structuring element B) occurs in the input image.
- Pruning. The hit-or-miss transform can be used to identify the end-points of a line to allow this line to be shrunk from each end to remove unwanted branches.
- Computing the Euler number.
Bibliography[]
- An Introduction to Morphological Image Processing by Edward R. Dougherty, ISBN 0-8194-0845-X (1992)
- Mathematical morphology
- Digital geometry