So far in this chapter, we have looked at image thresholding operations. As we have stated a number of times, the end-result of these thresholding operations is binary images. These binary images are, of course, not very pleasant to look at! This means that we don't really create them for their aesthetic value. Rather, they serve as inputs to the subsequent processing stages of our image processing pipeline. The solutions to most of the common computer vision and image processing problems can be viewed as a pipeline, rather than a single algorithm. The outputs of the current operation serve as inputs to the next and so on until we reach the desired output stage. Image thresholding is one such stage that you might come across in any pipeline (and so is image smoothing/blurring).
What we are going to do in this section is learn in brief about one more operation that makes frequent appearances in the image processing pipelines that we just discussed-morphological operations...
