Low-Complexity Binary Morphology Architectures With Flat Rectangular Structuring Elements

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems. I, Regular papers Regular papers, 2008-09, Vol.55 (8), p.2216-2225
• Main Authors: Hedberg, H., Kristensen, F., Owall, V.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Application software; Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC); binary; Cameras; dilation; erosion; Field programmable gate arrays; field-programmable gate array (FPGA); Filtering; Frequency estimation; Hardware; Image processing; Image segmentation; Morphology; Surveillance; surveillance system
• ISSN: 1549-8328; 1558-0806
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSI.2008.918140

This article describes and evaluates algorithms and their hardware architectures for binary morphological erosion and dilation. In particular, a fast stall-free low-complexity architecture is proposed that takes advantage of the morphological duality principle and structuring element (SE) decomposition. The design is intended to be used as a hardware accelerator in real-time embedded processing applications. Hence, the aim is to minimize the number of operations, memory requirement, and memory accesses per pixel. The main advantage of the proposed architecture is that for the common class of flat and rectangular SEs, complexity and number of memory accesses per pixel is low and independent of both image and SE size. The proposed design is compared to the more common delay-line architecture in terms of complexity, memory requirements and execution time, both for an actual implementation and as a function of image resolution and SE size. The architecture is implemented for the UMC 0.13- mum CMOS process using a resolution of 640 × 480. A maximum SE of 63 × 63 is supported at an estimated clock frequency of 333 MHz.