Development of Deep Learning Framework for Mathematical Morphology

Mathematical morphology has been applied as a collection of nonlinear operations related to object features in images. In this paper, we present morphological layers in deep learning framework, namely MorphNet, to perform atomic morphological operations, such as dilation and erosion. For propagation of losses through the proposed deep learning framework, we approximate the dilation and erosion operations by differential and smooth multivariable functions of the softmax function, and therefore enable the neural network to be optimized. The proposed operations are analyzed by the derivative of approximation functions in the deep learning framework. Experimental results show that the output structuring element of a morphological neuron and the target structuring element are matched to confirm the efficiency and correctness of the proposed framework.