'**SUMMARY**
Apply a morphological dilation. An dilation has the effect of smoothing blobs while
intensifying the amount of noise blobs.
This implementation uses the default openCV 3X3 square kernel
Erosion is effectively a local maxima detector, the kernel moves over the image and
takes the maxima value inside the kernel.
* See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilation_(morphology)
* See: http://opencv.willowgarage.com/documentation/cpp/image_filtering.html#cv-dilate
* Example Use: A part\'s blob needs to be smoother
* Example Code: ./examples/MorphologyExample.py
**PARAMETERS**
* *iterations* - the number of times to run the dilation operation.
**RETURNS**
A SimpleCV image.
**EXAMPLE**
>>> img = Image("lenna")
>>> derp = img.binarize()
>>> derp.dilate(3).show()
**SEE ALSO**
:py:meth:`erode`
:py:meth:`binarize`
:py:meth:`morphOpen`
:py:meth:`morphClose`
:py:meth:`morphGradient`
:py:meth:`findBlobsFromMask`'

def dilate(self, iterations=1):

    retVal = self.getEmpty()
    kern = cv.CreateStructuringElementEx(3, 3, 1, 1, cv.CV_SHAPE_RECT)
    cv.Dilate(self.getBitmap(), retVal, kern, iterations)
    return Image(retVal, colorSpace=self._colorSpace)
