Abstract Mathematical morphology based on structuring element: Application to morpho-logic

Abstract

A general definition of mathematical morphology has been defined within the algebraic framework of complete lattice theory. In this framework, dealing with deterministic and increasing operators, a dilation (respectively an erosion) is an operation which is distributive over supremum (respectively infimum). From this simple definition of dilation and erosion, we cannot say much about the properties of them. However, when they form an adjunction, many important properties can be derived such as monotonicity, idempotence, and extensivity or anti-extensivity of their composition, preservation of infimum and supremum, etc. Mathematical morphology has been first developed in the setting of sets, and then extended to other algebraic structures such as graphs, hypergraphs or simplicial complexes. For all these algebraic structures, erosion and dilation are usually based on structuring elements. The goal is then to match these structuring elements on given objects either to dilate or erode them. One of the advantages of defining erosion and dilation based on structuring elements is that these operations are adjoint. Based on this observation, this paper proposes to define, at the abstract level of category theory, erosion and dilation based on structuring elements. We then define the notion of morpho-category on which erosion and dilation are defined. We then show that topos and more precisely topos of presheaves are good candidates to generate morpho-categories. However, topos do not allow taking into account the notion of inclusion between substructures but rather are defined by monics up to domain isomorphism. Therefore we define the notion of morpholizable category which allows generating morpho-categories where substructures are defined along inclusion morphisms. A direct application of this framework is to generalize modal morpho-logic to other algebraic structures than simple sets.