Morphological operations for color image processing

in this paper operations based on mathematical morphology which have been developed for binary and grayscale images are extended to color images. We investigate two approaches for "color morphology"-a vector approach and a component-wise approach. New vector morphological filtering operations are defined, and a set-theoretic analysis of these vector operations is presented. We also present experimental results comparing the performance of the vector approach and the component-wise approach for multiscale color image analysis and for noise suppression in color images, (C) 1999 SPIE and IS&T. [S1017-9909(99)00602-9].