Fig 1.

Successive iterations of morphologic dilatation operator on two simulated clusters.

Row 1 (from the top) demonstrates two non-overlapping clusters of different shapes.

Row 2 demonstrates growth of each cluster by using a morphologic dilatation operator that created an overlap region while maintaining the native shape of each cluster.

Row 3 demonstrates increasing overlap with repeated iterations of dilatation operator. During each iteration, additional areas of overlap are weighted by using an exponential weighting function and added to the total overlap volume.

Fig 2. Exponential weighting function. Additional overlapping clusters from dilatation operation are weighted on the basis of the iteration.