I am trying to use leptonica API as an OCR pre-processing step for Tesseract. I would like to perform a simple dilation but I don't understand how the structuring element part works in Leptonica. I have found different references on Leptonica but none of them was explaining the functioning of that part of the API.
I would like to do a dilation with a '+' as a structuring element:
| 0 | 1 | 0 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | 0 |
also I am questioning about the use of Leptonica vs hand-crafted processing, as this is quite simple to implement and I don't want to use any other structured element for my morphological processing.