Fusion Algorithm not Affected by the Picture Frame.

This paper discusses the properties and the algorithms of the fusion operations, which are one of the fundamental techniques of binary image processing. First, a theoretical discussion is made for infinitely spread images, deriving several properties for the fusion operations. Those properties indicate the equivalence among the fusion operations and their iterations and combinations. Since the actual input images are finite, those properties are not satisfied by a simple algorithm due to the effect of the picture frame. This paper presents algorithm not affected by the picture frame for the general-purpose sequential computers and for the dedicated parallel-processing hardwares. Those algorithms perform the fusion operation by executing the first operation in the fusion (that is, the expansion or the contraction) together with the distance transformation, and by performing the second operation using the distance information obtained in the first. The proposed algorithms have the feature that most of the properties for infinite images also apply to images of finite size. With this feature, the proposed algorithms are shown to be suited to parallel processing with a small number of processors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]