Morphological reconstruction of semantic layers in map images

Map images are composed of semantic layers depicted in arbitrary color. Color separation is often needed to divide the image into layers for storage and processing. Separation can result in severe artifacts because of the overlapping of the layers. In this work, we introduce a technique to restore the original semantic lay- ers after the color separation. The proposed restoration technique improves compression performance of the reconstructed layers in comparison to the corrupted ones when compressed by lossless algorithms such as International Communication Unit (ITU) Group 4 (TIFF G4), Portable Network Graphics (PNG), Joint Bi-level Image experts Group (JBIG), and context tree method. The resulting tech- nique also provides good visual quality of the reconstructed image layers, and can therefore be applied for selective layer removal/ extraction in other map processing applications, e.g., area