Mathematical morphology was born in 1964. It was put forward by J. Serra, a Ph.D. student at the French Institute of Mining, and his tutor Marcelon, who was engaged in the research of quantitative petrological analysis of iron ore cores and prediction of their mining value, and introduced morphological expression for the first time in theory.

A particle analysis method was established. Their work laid the theoretical foundation of this topic, such as hit/miss transformation, open and close operation, Boolean model and texture analyzer prototype.

The basic idea of mathematical morphology is to measure and extract the corresponding shape in an image with structural elements with certain shapes, so as to achieve the purpose of image analysis and recognition.