Morphological texture description of grayscale and color images

Texture constitutes one of the fundamental properties of objects, besides color and shape. In several image analysis applications it is often the only exploitable quality of objects. As such, it has been studied, described, segmented, synthesized or in short analyzed, extensively. Among the plethora of texture description methods, mathematical morphology deserves special attention, as it excels at the exploitation of spatial relationships among pixels, rendering it inherently suitable for texture description. In this chapter, we focus on morphological texture description methods for grayscale and color images, in an effort to spread the advantages possessed by this framework in the context of texture analysis. We review a great number of descriptors, ranging from the basic granulometries and pattern spectra to the most advanced multivariate and multi-dimensional size, shape, orientation and distance distributions, providing application examples as well as experimental results.