The morphological opening (Serra, 1982)
of a set $W$ by a distance $r > 0$
is the subset of points in $W$ that can be
separated from the boundary of $W$ by a circle of radius $r$.
That is, a point $x$ belongs to the opening
if it is possible to draw a circle of radius $r$ (not necessarily
centred on $x$) that has $x$ on the inside
and the boundary of $W$ on the outside.
The opened set is a subset of W
. For a small radius $r$, the opening operation
has the effect of smoothing out irregularities in the boundary of
$W$. For larger radii, the opening operation removes promontories
in the boundary. For very large radii, the opened set is empty.
This function computes the opening of the window w
as a binary pixel mask. If w
is not already a mask, it is first
converted to a mask by as.mask
. The arguments
"..."
determine the pixel resolution. There is a sensible
default.
The algorithm simply applies erode.owin
followed by
dilate.owin
.