Edges In Natural Images Research Articles

Generalized Boundaries from Multiple Image Interpretations.

Boundary detection is a fundamental computer vision problem that is essential for a variety of tasks, such as contour and region segmentation, symmetry detection and object recognition and categorization. We propose a generalized formulation for boundary detection, with closed-form solution, applicable to the localization of different types of boundaries, such as object edges in natural images and occlusion boundaries from video. Our generalized boundary detection method (Gb) simultaneously combines low-level and mid-level image representations in a single eigenvalue problem and solves for the optimal continuous boundary orientation and strength. The closed-form solution to boundary detection enables our algorithm to achieve state-of-the-art results at a significantly lower computational cost than current methods. We also propose two complementary novel components that can seamlessly be combined with Gb: first, we introduce a soft-segmentation procedure that provides region input layers to our boundary detection algorithm for a significant improvement in accuracy, at negligible computational cost; second, we present an efficient method for contour grouping and reasoning, which when applied as a final post-processing stage, further increases the boundary detection performance.

Learning a Dictionary of Shape Epitomes with Applications to Image Labeling.

The first main contribution of this paper is a novel method for representing images based on a dictionary of shape epitomes. These shape epitomes represent the local edge structure of the image and include hidden variables to encode shift and rotations. They are learnt in an unsupervised manner from groundtruth edges. This dictionary is compact but is also able to capture the typical shapes of edges in natural images. In this paper, we illustrate the shape epitomes by applying them to the image labeling task. In other work, described in the supplementary material, we apply them to edge detection and image modeling. We apply shape epitomes to image labeling by using Conditional Random Field (CRF) Models. They are alternatives to the superpixel or pixel representations used in most CRFs. In our approach, the shape of an image patch is encoded by a shape epitome from the dictionary. Unlike the superpixel representation, our method avoids making early decisions which cannot be reversed. Our resulting hierarchical CRFs efficiently capture both local and global class co-occurrence properties. We demonstrate its quantitative and qualitative properties of our approach with image labeling experiments on two standard datasets: MSRC-21 and Stanford Background.

Low-Level Feature Extraction for Edge Detection Using Genetic Programming

Edge detection is a subjective task. Traditionally, a moving window approach is used, but the window size in edge detection is a tradeoff between localization accuracy and noise rejection. An automatic technique for searching a discriminated pixel's neighbors to construct new edge detectors is appealing to satisfy different tasks. In this paper, we propose a genetic programming (GP) system to automatically search pixels (a discriminated pixel and its neighbors) to construct new low-level subjective edge detectors for detecting edges in natural images, and analyze the pixels selected by the GP edge detectors. Automatically searching pixels avoids the problem of blurring edges from a large window and noise influence from a small window. Linear and second-order filters are constructed from the pixels with high occurrences in these GP edge detectors. The experiment results show that the proposed GP system has good performance. A comparison between the filters with the pixels selected by GP and all pixels in a fixed window indicates that the set of pixels selected by GP is compact but sufficiently rich to construct good edge detectors.

Detecting natural occlusion boundaries using local cues

Occlusion boundaries and junctions provide important cues for inferring three-dimensional scene organization from two-dimensional images. Although several investigators in machine vision have developed algorithms for detecting occlusions and other edges in natural images, relatively few psychophysics or neurophysiology studies have investigated what features are used by the visual system to detect natural occlusions. In this study, we addressed this question using a psychophysical experiment where subjects discriminated image patches containing occlusions from patches containing surfaces. Image patches were drawn from a novel occlusion database containing labeled occlusion boundaries and textured surfaces in a variety of natural scenes. Consistent with related previous work, we found that relatively large image patches were needed to attain reliable performance, suggesting that human subjects integrate complex information over a large spatial region to detect natural occlusions. By defining machine observers using a set of previously studied features measured from natural occlusions and surfaces, we demonstrate that simple features defined at the spatial scale of the image patch are insufficient to account for human performance in the task. To define machine observers using a more biologically plausible multiscale feature set, we trained standard linear and neural network classifiers on the rectified outputs of a Gabor filter bank applied to the image patches. We found that simple linear classifiers could not match human performance, while a neural network classifier combining filter information across location and spatial scale compared well. These results demonstrate the importance of combining a variety of cues defined at multiple spatial scales for detecting natural occlusions.

Nonedge-Specific Adaptive Scheme for Highly Robust Blind Motion Deblurring of Natural Imagess

Blind motion deblurring estimates a sharp image from a motion blurred image without the knowledge of the blur kernel. Although significant progress has been made on tackling this problem, existing methods, when applied to highly diverse natural images, are still far from stable. This paper focuses on the robustness of blind motion deblurring methods toward image diversity-a critical problem that has been previously neglected for years. We classify the existing methods into two schemes and analyze their robustness using an image set consisting of 1.2 million natural images. The first scheme is edge-specific, as it relies on the detection and prediction of large-scale step edges. This scheme is sensitive to the diversity of the image edges in natural images. The second scheme is nonedge-specific and explores various image statistics, such as the prior distributions. This scheme is sensitive to statistical variation over different images. Based on the analysis, we address the robustness by proposing a novel nonedge-specific adaptive scheme (NEAS), which features a new prior that is adaptive to the variety of textures in natural images. By comparing the performance of NEAS against the existing methods on a very large image set, we demonstrate its advance beyond the state-of-the-art.

Salient Edge Detection in Natural Images

Salient edge detection which is mentioned less frequently than salient point detection is another important cue for subsequent processing in computer vision. How to find the salient edges in natural images is not an easy work. This paper proposes a simple method for salient edge detection which preserves the edges with more salient points on the boundaries and cancels the less salient ones or noise edges in natural images. According to the Gestalt Principles of past experience and entirety, we should not detect the whole edges in natural images. Only salient ones can be an advantageous tool for the following step just like object tracking, image segmentation or contour detection. Salient edges can also enhance the efficiency of computing and save the space of storage. The experiments show the promising results.

適応型多レベルブロックトランケーション符号化による小型モバイル表示器用画像圧縮手法の提案

We developed mobile multi-level adaptive block truncation coding (BTC) that reduces the size of the mobile source driver's embedded RAM by 3/4 (for VGA screen with QVGA-size memory). The BTC suppresses border artifacts,especially in images shown in windows of PCs,and it corrects jagged edges in natural images. It also improves the PSNR by approximately 6.6 dB compared with that of conventional quad decimation for natural images. Our BTC enables the suppression of artifacts using: (1) trimmed averaging for three-level representative values and (2) adaptive scheme selection (two- or three-level).

Detection and Coding of Edges Using Directional Masks

This paper describes a new image coding system which combines the detection and coding of visually significant edges in natural images. The edges are defined as amplitude discontinuities between different regions of an image. The edge detection system makes use of 3 x 3 masks, which are well suited for digital implementation. Edge angles are quantized to eight equally spaced directions, suitable for chain coding of contours. Use of an edge direction map improves the simple thresholding of gradient modulus images. The concept of local connectivity of the edge direction map is useful in improving the performance of this method as well as other edge operators such as Kirsch and Sobel. The concepts of an "edge activity index" and a "locally adaptive threshold" are introduced and shown to improve the performance even further.

Edge detection by compass gradient masks

A new edge detection system is described, which is suitable for combining the detection and coding of visually significant edges in natural images. The edges are defined as amplitude discontinuities between different regions of an image. The edge detection system makes use of 3 × 3 comprass gradient, masks, which are well suited for digital implementation. Edge angles are quantizcd to eight equally spaced directions, suitable for chain coding of contours. Use of an edge direction map improves the simple thresholding of gradient modulus images. The concept of local connectivity of the edge direction map is useful ia improving the performance of this method as well as other edge operators such as Kitsch and Sobel. The concepts of art “edge activity index” and a “locally adaptive threshold” are introduced and shown to improve the performance even further.