Erosion (morphology)

For other uses, see Erosion (disambiguation).
The erosion of the dark-blue square by a disk, resulting in the light-blue square.

Erosion (usually represented by ⊖) is one of two fundamental operations (the other being dilation) in morphological image processing from which all other morphological operations are based. It was originally defined for binary images, later being extended to grayscale images, and subsequently to complete lattices. The erosion operation usually uses a structuring element for probing and reducing the shapes contained in the input image.