A Partial-result-reuse Architecture and Its Design Technique for Morphological Operations

This paper proposes a new cost-effective architecture for mathematical morphology named Partial-Result-Reuse (PRR) architecture. For a lot of real-time applications of mathematical morphology, the hardware implementation is necessary; however, the hardware cost of almost existing morphology architectures is too high when dealing with large structuring elements. With partial-resultreuse concept and self-affinity property of general structuring elements, the proposed architecture is more cost-effective and more general than existing morphology architectures. It can deal with morphological operations with arbitrary structuring elements and can be used for other semi-group operations, and only 2 log2 n comparators are needed for nxn structuring elements. Simulation shows this architecture can dramatically reduce hardware cost of morphological operations with all kinds of structuring elements.