Different modified top-hat transformations through structuring element construction have been proposed to improve the performance of classical top-hat transformation. Firstly, this paper reviews different modified top-hat transformations. Then, the relationships of different modified top-hat transformations are analyzed. Moreover, generating the improved forms of different modified top-hat transformations through suppressing the negative values is also discussed. This paper indicates that some different modified top-hat transformations based on structuring element construction could be derived from new top-hat transformation, and the improved forms of top-hat transformations are more useful for different applications. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.