There are several ways to describe phenomena that spread in a space. One way is to consider them as objects, that is, as subsets of their space. The method that derives from this point of view is called mathematical morphology. Mathematical morphology goes back to Matheron’s and Serra’s works (see Serra’s work [1] for a short overview on mathematical morphology).
It is well known that linear convolutions can be morphologically realized by using only min/max operations and additions. This result points to the connection between morphological operations and linear systems [2].
The authors of this paper try to reveal the realizability of binary morphological operations by using linear systems, and to transfer well-known implementation methods from classical systems theory to the binary morphological domain. The main idea of this work is based on the fact that elementary morphological operations can be expressed by combining a linear system with a succeeding thresholding operation. The paper’s main goals are to describe the correspondence between mathematical morphology and classical linear signals, and to show that systems theory allows for the application of algorithms from the well-known field of linear systems to mathematical morphology.