Parallel implementation of sequential morphological filters

Many useful morphological filters are built as more or less long concatenations of erosions and dilations: openings, closings, size distributions, sequential filters, etc. An efficient implementation of these concatenations would allow all the sequentially concatenated operators run simultaneously, on the time-delayed data. A recent algorithm (see below) for the morphological dilation/erosion allows such inter-operator parallelism. This paper introduces an additional, intra-operator level of parallelism in this dilation/erosion algorithm. Realized in a dedicated hardware, for rectangular structuring elements with programmable size, such an implementation allows obtaining previously unachievable, real-time performances for these traditionally costly operators. Low latency and memory requirements are the main benefits when the performance is not deteriorated even for long concatenations or high-resolution images.