Partial-result-reuse architecture and its design technique for morphological operations

This paper proposes a new cost-effective architecture for mathematical morphology named partial-result-reuse (PRR) architecture. For many real-time applications of mathematical morphology, the hardware implementation is necessary; however, the hardware cost of most existing morphology architectures is too high when dealing with large structuring elements. With the partial-result-reuse concept and self-affinity property of general structuring elements, the proposed architecture is more cost-effective and more general than the existing morphology architectures. It can deal with morphological operations with arbitrary structuring elements and can be used for other semi-group operations, and only 2[log/sub 2/n] comparators are needed for n/spl times/n structuring elements. Simulation shows that this architecture can dramatically reduce the hardware cost of morphological operations with all kinds of structuring elements.