Prominent edge detection with deep metric expression and multi-scale features

Abstract

Edge detection is one of today’s hottest computer vision issues with widely applications. It is beneficial for improving the capability of many vision systems, such as semantic segmentation, salient object detection and object recognition. Deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) recently have been employed to extract robust features, and have achieved a definite improvement. However, there is still a long run to study this hotspot with the main reason that CNNs-based approaches may cause the edges thicker. To address this problem, a novel semantic edge detection algorithm using multi-scale features is proposed. Our model is deep symmetrical metric learning network, which includes 3 key parts. Firstly, the deep detail layer, as a preprocessing layer and a guide module, is employed to remove some low-frequency information and still maintain the edge. Secondly, the deep encoder-decoder networks extract multi-scale features of original image, integrated for complementing information among each level feature. Finally, metric learning is introduced to generate a metric space used to predict edge result. It is easy to distinguish different categories, such as edge space and object space. Simulations and comparisons on benchmark datasets demonstrate the proposed algorithm is superior to the others through visual and quantitative evaluation, and specifically, the score of ODS reachs 0.788.