In this paper

a theory of color-scale morphology is proposed

which is an evolution of mathematical morphology from gray-scale image to color image. Based on RGB(red-green-blue) coordinate system

some colorscale morphological operators are presented

and their properties are discussed. The relationships between colorscale morphology and gray-scale morphology are established. Using the basic color-scale morphological operations

the other composite color-scale morphological transforms

such as color-scale opening

closing

iterative morphological filters

color-scale morphological gradient and color-scale top-hat transform etc.

can be constructed. Some experimental results are given. As an extension of mathematical morphology to color space

the transformation can be directly and efficiently used to process color image

encode image and extract shape features of objects.