Microscope Image Processing

The opening top-hat and closing top-hat results correspond to the gray parts of

Figs. 8.3a and 8.3b, respectively.

As a filter, opening can clean the boundary of an object by eliminating

small extrusions, but it does this in a much finer manner than erosion. The

net effect is that the opened image is a much better replica of the original

than the eroded image (compare Fig. 8.3a with Fig. 8.2a). Analogous remarks

apply to closing and the filling of small intrusions (compare Fig. 8.3b with

Fig. 8.2b).

Binary images can have both additive noise (extraneous foreground pixels in

the background) and subtractive noise (extraneous background pixels in the

foreground). One strategy for correcting this is to open the image to eliminate

additive noise and then to ...