High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Dilation is one of the basic operations in mathematical morphology. Originally developed for binary images, it has been expanded first to grayscale images, and then to complete lattices. The dilation operation usually uses a structuring element for probing and expanding the shapes contained in the input image. In binary morphology, dilation is a shift-invariant translation invariant operator, strongly related to the Minkowski addition. A binary image is viewed in mathematical morphology as a subset of an Euclidean space Rd or the integer grid Zd, for some dimension d. Let E be a Euclidean space or an integer grid, A a binary image in E, and B a structuring element.