A Color Image Edge Detection Algorithm Based on Color Difference

Abstract

Although image edge detection algorithms have been widely applied in image processing, the existing algorithms still face two important problems. On one hand, to restrain the interference of noise, smoothing filters are generally exploited in the existing algorithms, resulting in loss of significant edges. On the other hand, since the existing algorithms are sensitive to noise, many noisy edges are usually detected, which will disturb the subsequent processing. Therefore, a color image edge detection algorithm based on color difference is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a new operation called color separation is defined in this paper, which can reflect the information of color difference. Then, for the neighborhood of each pixel, color separations are calculated in four different directions to detect the edges. Experimental results on natural and synthetic images show that the proposed algorithm can remove a large number of noisy edges and be robust to the smoothing filters. Furthermore, the proposed edge detection algorithm is applied in road foreground segmentation and shadow removal, which achieves good performances.