Multi-Scale Anisotropic Gaussian Kernels for Image Edge Detection

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In this paper, a new edge detection method is proposed where multi-scale anisotropic Gaussian kernels (AGKs) are used to obtain an edge map from an input image. The main advantage of the proposed method is that high edge detection accuracy and edge resolution are attained while maintaining good noise robustness. The proposed method consists of three aspects: First, anisotropic Gaussian directional derivatives (AGDDs) are derived from the AGKs which are used to acquire local intensity variation from an input image with multiple scales. Second, multi-scale AGDD based edge strength maps (ESMs) are fused into a new ESM with high edge resolution and little edge stretch effect which has the ability to solve the contradiction issue between noise robustness and accurate edge extraction. Third, the fused ESM is embedded into the framework of Canny detection for obtaining edge contours. Finally, the criteria on precision-recall curve, detection accuracy, and noise robustness are used to evaluate the proposed detector against four state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that our proposed detector outperforms all the other tested edge detection methods.