Equivalents to OpenCV's erode and dilate in PIL?

Question

I want to do some image OCR with PyTesseract, and I've seen that OpenCV's erode and dilate functions are very useful for noise removal pre-processing.

Since PyTesseract already requires PIL/Pillow, I'd like to do the noise removal in PIL, rather than get another library. Is there an equivalent to erode/dilate in PIL? (My research seems to suggest that MaxFilter and MinFilter could be used this way, but it's not fully clear to me if that's really true.)

Thanks!

Answer 1

The best option is to use OpenCV python bindings. However, if you want to use PIL/Pillow, there is the ImageFilter Module: http://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/3.1.x/reference/ImageFilter.html

dilation_img = src_img.filter(ImageFilter.MaxFilter(3))
erosion_img = src_img.filter(ImageFilter.MinFilter(3))

The number 3 in the example is the mask size;