A hybrid genetic algorithm based learning method for the morphological neural networks (MNN) is proposed. The morphological neural networks are based on max-plus algebra, therefore, it is difficult to optimize the coefficients of MNN by the learning method with derivative operations. In order to solve the difficulty, a hybrid genetic algorithm based learning method to optimize the coefficients of MNN is used. Through the image compression/reconstruction experiment using test images extracted from standard image database(SIDBA), it is confirmed that the quality of the reconstructed images obtained by the proposed method is better than that obtained by the conventional neural networks.