Abstract Based on the generalized open-closing and close-opening operations in mathematical morphology, a class of generalized parallel complex morphological filters is constructed by using multiple structuring elements in this paper. These filters possess some important properties such as translation invariance, increasing, duality and idempotence and obey the threshold superposition rule. They can not only effeciently suppress noise in images but also preserve the geometrical features of images. The results of computer simulation show that the new filtering method is quite effective.