The research of infrared image segmentation based on mathematical morphology

This paper describes a new method for infrared image segmentation based on mathematical morphology. The proposed algorithm relies on four steps: First, to reduce the influence of asymmetrical background, top-hat transform was used, and gradient image was obtained by morphological gradient transform. Second, gradient image was reconstructed by reconstruction operator, which was constituted by doing opening by reconstruction operation and closing by reconstruction operation successively. Through gradient image reconstruction, important region contours are preserved while most tiny regular details and noises are removed. Finally, auto threshold technique was used to extract the region edges form reconstructed gradient image. Experimental results show that the approach performs well in target segmentation in infrared images with complicated background.