In this regard, morphological profiles (MP) are one of the popular and powerful image analysis techniques that enable us to compute such spectral-spatial pixel descriptions. They have been studied extensively in the last decade and their effectiveness has been validated repeatedly.

The characterization of spatial information obtained by the application of a MP is particularly suitable for representing the multi-scale variations of image structures, but they are limited by the shape of the structuring elements. To avoid this limitation, morphological attribute profiles (AP) have been developed. By operating directly on connected components instead of pixels, not only we are able to employ arbitrary region descriptors (e.g. shape, color, texture, etc) but it paves the way for object based image analysis as well. In addition, APs can be implemented efficiently by means of hierarchical image representations, e.g. Max-/Min-tree and alpha-tree.

The aforementioned proposed techniques for hyper-spectral remote sensing image analysis are basically based on marginal processing of the image, i.e. analyzing each spectral channel individually and not simultaneously. Therefore, the channels’ correlation is neglected in the conventional marginal approaches.

Motivated from that, our project focuses on extending the mathematical morphology to the field of hyper-spectral image processing and applying morphological content based operators, e.g. MP and AP, on all of the spectral bands simultaneously rather than marginally in order to take the spectral channels’ correlation into account.