Jean Serra

Jean Serra
Jean Serra in 2007
Born	1940 Algeria
Citizenship	France
Known for	co-founding Mathematical morphology
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics, geology
Institutions	Centre de Morphologie Mathématique, École des Mines de Paris

Jean Paul Frédéric Serra (born 1940 in Algeria) is a French mathematician and engineer, and known as one of the co-founders (together with Georges Matheron) of mathematical morphology.

Serra received a scientific baccalauréat in 1957, and an engineering degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Nancy in 1962. He also obtained a Bachelor degree in philosophy/psychology, from the University of Nancy, in 1965. He obtained a PhD in Mathematical Geology from the University of Nancy in 1967, and a doctorat d'etat in Mathematics, from the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, in 1986. He speaks French, Russian, English, and Spanish.

From 1962 to 1966, while a research engineer at the Institut de recherche de la sidérurgie, France, Serra was a PhD student under the supervision of Georges Matheron. The subject of his thesis was " modeling of the iron deposit of Lorraine, at various scales," one of the goals of which was to quantify petrographic characteristics of its iron orebody. During that period, Serra came up with the idea of using structuring elements for transforming images of cross sections of the ore, in order to gain information about it. The result was a device called "Texture Analyser", which was patented in 1965. This work also lead to the concept of hit-or-miss transform, which evolved into the concepts of erosion, dilation, opening and closing due to Matheron. Granulometry and other concepts followed. In the Winter of 1966, in a pub of Nancy, Matheron, Philippe Formery, and Serra decided to give a name to this body of works: "Mathematical morphology". The new theory and method has since evolved to be applied in a variety of image processing problems and tasks, and is researched worldwide (main article: Mathematical morphology).