On the morphological processing of hue

Although polar colour spaces are being increasingly used in the context of colour mathematical morphology, mainly due to their intuitiveness, the processing of the circular hue band continues to be their main drawback. In this paper, we discuss the two principal problems concerning the morphological processing of hue, first its lack of a lattice structure, which we propose to introduce by means of a distance based formulation from multiple representative reference hue points. And second, the distinction of chromatic from achromatic pixels, since the hue component is of no significance for "low" saturation levels. For this purpose, we present a new weighting scheme, based on the combination of saturation and luminance channels. Application results on texture classification, asserting the superior performance of this approach, are also included. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.