2D Parallel Architecture for Morphological Operators Supporting Multiple Shaped Structuring Elements

This paper presents a reconfigurable 2D parallel architecture designed to implement efficiently two fundamental gray scale morphological operations: dilation and erosion. The architecture is expected to be used as a hardware core integrated in real time application. Moreover, the proposed architecture allows processing data on high resolution images with reconfigurable size and arbitrary shape of structuring elements. The main advantage of the proposed architecture is its low latency, higher throughput and higher processing frame rate. Additionally, the architecture processes data on stream which avoids the need of any buffering at input level. The architecture is successfully implemented and prototyped on Virtex-5 field programmable gate array. Implementation results show that the architecture can achieve high frame rate: for example, for a 1024x768 image and 11x11 structuring element, we reach a frame rate of 341 Fps.