Image Processing Toolbox User's Guide

Dilation and Erosion

Dilation and erosion are two fundamental morphological operations. Dilation adds pixels to the boundaries of objects in an image, while erosion removes pixels on object boundaries. The number of pixels added or removed from the objects in an image depends on the size and shape of the structuring element used to process the image.

The following sections

• Provide important background information about how the dilation and erosion functions operate
• Describe structuring elements and how to create them
• Describe how to perform a morphological dilation
• Describe how to perform a morphological erosion
• Describe some of the common operations that are based on dilation and erosion
• Describe toolbox functions that are based on dilation and erosion

To view an extended example that uses morphological processing to solve an image processing problem, see the Image Processing Toolbox watershed segmentation demo.

Morphological Operations

Understanding Dilation and Erosion

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