In computer vision and image processing, edge detection concerns the localization of significant variations of the grey level image and the identification of the physical phenomena that originated them. This information is very useful for applications in 3D reconstruction, motion, recognition, image enhancement and restoration, image registration, image compression, and so on. Usually, edge detection requires smoothing and differentiation of the image. Differentiation is an ill-conditioned problem and smoothing results in a loss of information. It is difficult to design a general edge detection algorithm which performs well in many contexts and captures the requirements of subsequent processing stages. Consequently, over the history of digital image processing a variety of edge detectors have been devised which differ in their mathematical and algorithmic properties. This paper is an account of the current state of our understanding of edge detection. We propose an overview of research in edge detection: edge definition, properties of detectors, the methodology of edge detection, the mutual influence between edges and detectors, and existing edge detectors and their implementation.

Edge Detection Techniques-An Overview

A new method for evaluating edge detection algorithms is presented and applied to measure the relative performance of algorithms by Canny, Nalwa-Binford, Iverson-Zucker, Bergholm, and Rothwell. The basic measure of performance is a visual rating score which indicates the perceived quality of the edges for identifying an object. The process of evaluating edge detection algorithms with this performance measure requires the collection of a set of gray-scale images, optimizing the input parameters for each algorithm, conducting visual evaluation experiments and applying statistical analysis methods. The novel aspect of this work is the use of a visual task and real images of complex scenes in evaluating edge detectors. The method is appealing because, by definition, the results agree with visual evaluations of the edge images.

A robust visual method for assessing the relative performance of edge-detection algorithms

In this paper, we examine the main advances registered in the last ten years in Pattern Recognition methodologies based on graph matching and related techniques, analyzing more than 180 papers; the...

Graph matching and learning in pattern recognition in the last 10 years

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new (to computer vision) experimental framework which allows us to make quantitative comparisons using subjective ratings made by people. This approach avoids the issue of pixel-level ground truth. As a result, it does not allow us to make statements about the frequency of false positive and false negative errors at the pixel level. Instead, using experimental design and statistical techniques borrowed from Psychology, we make statements about whether the outputs of one edge detector are rated statistically significantly higher than the outputs of another. This approach offers itself as a nice complement to signal-based quantitative measures. Also, the evaluation paradigm in this paper is goal oriented; in particular, we consider edge detection in the context of object recognition. The human judges rate the edge, detectors based on how well the capture the salient features of real objects. So far, edge detection modules have been designed and evaluated in isolation, except for the recent work by Ramesh and Haralick (1992). The only prior work (that we are aware of) which also uses humans to rate image algorithms is that of Reeves and Higdon (1995). They use human ratings to decide on regularization parameters of image restoration. Fram and Deutch (1975) also used human subjects, however, the focus was on human versus machine performance rather than using human ratings to compare different edge detectors. The use of human judges to rate image outputs mist be approached systematically. Experiments must be designed and conducted carefully, and results interpreted with appropriate statistical tools. The use of statistical analysis in vision system performance characterization has been rare. The only prior work in the area that we are aware of is that of Nair et al. (1995), who used statistical ranking procedures to compare neural network based object recognition systems.

Comparison of edge detectors: a methodology and initial study

Comparison of Edge Detectors

A multi-scale edge detector

In the literature, although structural representations (e.g. graph) are more powerful than feature vectors in terms of representational abilities, many robust and efficient methods for classification (unsupervised and supervised) have been developed for feature vector representations. In this paper, we propose a graph embedding technique based on the constant shift embedding which transforms a graph to a real vector. This technique gives the abilities to perform the graph classification tasks by procedures based on feature vectors. Through a set of experiments we show that the proposed technique outperforms the classification in the original graph domain and the other graph embedding techniques.

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Graph embedding using constant shift embedding

In the context of the NAVIDOMASS project, the problematic of this paper concerns the clustering of historical document images. We propose a structural-based framework to handle the ancient ornamental letters data-sets. The contribution, firstly, consists of examining the structural (i.e. graph) representation of the ornamental letters, secondly, the graph matching problem is applied to the resulted graph-based representations. In addition, a comparison between the structural (graphs) and statistical (generic Fourier descriptor) techniques is drawn.

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NAVIDOMASS: Structural-based Approaches Towards Handling Historical Documents

An approach to detect lofar lines

In the context of unsupervised clustering, a new algorithm for the domain of graphs is introduced. In this paper, the key idea is to adapt the mean-shift clustering and its variants proposed for the domain of feature vectors to graph clustering. These algorithms have been applied successfully in image analysis and computer vision domains. The proposed algorithm works in an iterative manner by shifting each graph towards the median graph in a neighborhood. Both the set median graph and the generalized median graph are tested for the shifting procedure. In the experiment part, a set of cluster validation indices are used to evaluate our clustering algorithm and a comparison with the well-known Kmeans algorithm is provided.

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Salvatore Tabbone

Papers

A multi-scale edge detector

Graph embedding using constant shift embedding

NAVIDOMASS: Structural-based Approaches Towards Handling Historical Documents

An approach to detect lofar lines

Median Graph Shift: A New Clustering Algorithm for Graph Domain