Book excerpt: The book is self-contained in the sense that it is accessible to engineers, scientists, and practitioners having no prior experience with morphology. In addition, most necessary background notions about digital image processing are covered. The emphasis being put on the techniques useful for solving practical problems rather than the theory underlying mathematical morphology, no special knowledge about set theory and topology is required. Nevertheless, the book goes well beyond an introduction to mathematical morphology. Indeed, starting from the fundamental transformations, more elaborate methods which have proven their practical usefulness are explained. This is achieved through a step by step process pursued until the most recent advances.