Mathematical Morphology and Geology: When Image Analysis Uses the Vocabulary of Earth Science a Review of Some Applications

Mathematical Morphology has proYed to be a yery powerful methodology in various applications of image analysis: industrial control, medical imagery, telecommunications, material sciences... This approach, however, has not yet fully entered the geological domain although many morphological tools can be described by referring to the vocabulary of earth science. A morphologist commonly uses concepts and tools named erosions, watersheds, catchment basins, flooding, levelings, crest lines, summits, ridges, valleys and so on. The aim of this lecture is to present some of these morphological tools and, through some applications in petrography, geology and seismic data processing, to explain their use and their interest in various image processing tasks such as filtering, segmentation and feature extraction. keywords: image analysis, image segmentation, geodesy, mathematical morphology, watersheds.