Grayscale morphological operators are often used for image structure analysis. Normally these operators use the maximum (dilation) or minimum (erosion) of nearest neighbor values. This study introduces the use of an adaptive structural element for use as a grayscale morphological operator in image analysis. The structural element introduces changes with grayscale pixel value. Simple and more complex synthetic sets are presented along with their dilation and erosion analyses. This adaptive operator permits calculation of the image surface area with changing resolution. The surface area is estimated from the adaptive operator through dilation or erosion with differencing of constructed images. Results...