
Chapter 11
Image Topology
11.1 Introduction
We are often interested in only the very basic aspects of an image: the number of
occurrences of a particular object; whether there are holes, and so on. The investigation of
these fundamental properties of an image is called digital topology or image topology and in
this chapter we shall investigate some of the more elementary aspects of this subject.
For example, consider an image thresholded and cleaned up with a morphological open-
ing to show a collection of blobs. Such an image can be obtained with MATLAB or Octave
by:
MATLAB/Octave
>> p = imread(’pinenuts.png’);
>> p2 = ~im2bw(p,graythresh(p));
>> p3 =