Department of Mechatronics

Edge Detection

MACHINE VISION AND IMAGE

PROCESSING
(MTE 4075)
Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, India
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Content:
▪Edge Detection
–Introduction
–Detection of Isolated Points
–Line Detection
–Edge Models
–Basic Edge Detection
–Advanced Edge detection technique
•Marr-Hildreth edge detector
•The Canny edge detector
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Introduction: Definition of Edges

• Edges are significant local changes of

intensity in an image.

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Introduction: What Causes Intensity Changes?

• Geometric events
– surface orientation (boundary) discontinuities
– depth discontinuities
– color and texture discontinuities

• Non-geometric events surface normal discontinuity

– illumination changes depth discontinuity

– shadows color discontinuity

– inter-reflections
illumination discontinuity

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Introduction: Goal of Edge Detection

• Produce a line “drawing” of a scene from an image of that

scene.

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Introduction: Why is Edge Detection Useful?

• Important features can be extracted from the edges of

an image (e.g., corners, lines, curves).
• These features are used by higher-level computer
vision algorithms (e.g., recognition).

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 Introduction

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 Introduction
▪ The basic definition of the first-order derivative
of a one dimensional function f(x) is the
difference

▪ The second-order derivative of a one-

dimensional function f ( x ) is the difference

▪ When we consider an image function of two

variables, f(x, y), at which time we will dealing
with partial derivatives along the two spatial
axes.
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 Introduction: Zero Crossings
• Zero crossings in the convolved Example function – a
result indicate presence of an smoothed step edge
edge
• Peaks in the first derivative are
equivalent to zero crossings in the
second derivative First derivative peak
• Magnitude of the edge is
proportional to the slope at the
zero crossing

Second derivative
Zero crossing

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Detection of Isolated Points:

• Apply Laplacian mask to image f(x,y)

• R(x,y) denotes filtered image
• Extract pixels that exceed the threshold T
• The image g(x,y) contains only edge/point

1 if R( x, y )  T
g(x, y) = 
0 otherwise

Point

Example 10.1
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Line Detection

• Horizontal mask to obtain horizontal lines

• +45 and -45 mask to obtain diagonal lines
• Vertical mask to obtain vertical lines

Example 10.2
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Line Detection

Detection of +45
line in an image

Example 10.3
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Edge Models

Step Edge Ramp Edge Roof Edge

Transition between 2 Edges blurred Base is 1 pixel, roof edge

Intensity levels with and/or noisy Is 1 pixel
1 pixel gap Slope depends Example:
on the blurring • Image of a wall with pipe,
• objects at different distances
• Roads in satellite images

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 First derivative: to detect the
presence of edges

Second derivative: to check edge pixel

moving from light to dark

Or dark to light

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 Original image First Second
Behaviour of the first and second and cross derivative derivative
derivatives of a noisy image sectional profile

• Edge operators also enhance

noise

• Example – first and second

derivatives of a noisy ramp edge

Increasing noise
– Even with very low noise, 1st
derivative is useless at this noise
level
– Second derivative is useless for even
less noise

Example 10.4
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Edge Detection: Fundamental Steps
(1) Smoothing: suppress as much noise as possible, without destroying true
edges.

(2) Enhancement: apply differentiation to enhance the quality of edges (i.e.,

sharpening).

(3)Thresholding: determine which edge pixels should be discarded as noise

and which should be retained (i.e., threshold edge magnitude).

(4) Localization: determine the exact edge location.

sub-pixel resolution might be required for some applications to estimate the location of an edge to
better than the spacing between pixels.

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Edge Detection:
• Practical edge detectors - first do image smoothing for noise reduction

• Example – Sobel filter • Effectively does a smoothing followed

-1 0 1
by a differencing
1
-2 0 2 -1 0 +1
2
differencing
-1 0 1 1
smoothing

• All edge detectors do

– Smoothing for noise reduction
– Detection of candidate edge points
– Edge localization – keeping only the points that are closest to the true edge

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 Edge Detection: Gradient operators

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Edge Detector: Example
Original image “pout.tif” Gradient magnitude, using Sobel masks

𝟏
𝟐 𝟐 𝟐
𝛛𝒇 𝛛𝒇
𝜵𝒇 = +
𝛛𝒙 𝛛𝒚
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Edge Detector: Example

original image horizontal edge vertical edge

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Edge Detector: Sobel Edge Detection Example

Source: J Hays
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Edge Detector: Sobel Edge Detection Example

Source: J Hays
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Edge Detector: Properties of an Edge Detector

Criteria for a good edge detector?

Good detection: find all real edges,
ignoring noise or other artifacts

Good localization: detect edges as

close as possible to true edges

Single response: return one point only for

each true edge point

Source: K Grauman
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 Advanced Edge Detection Technique:
• Marr-Hildreth edge detector (self learning)
• The Canny edge detector

Reference of Self Learning Topic:

Gonzalez, Rafael C., and Richard E. Woods. "Digital Image Processing, New Jersey.", 2007. 3rd edition. (Chapter-10, Page-714)

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The Canny edge detector
• Canny has shown that the first derivative of the Gaussian closely approximates
the operator that optimizes the product of signal-to-noise ratio and localization.
(i.e., analysis based on "step-edges" corrupted by "Gaussian noise“)

J. Canny, A Computational Approach To Edge Detection, IEEE Trans. Pattern

Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 8:679-714, 1986.
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The Canny edge detector: Algorithm

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The Canny edge detector: Algorithm

(and direction)
(and direction)

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The Canny edge detector:

Original image

Smoothing by Gaussian convolution

Differential operators along x and y axis

Non-maximum suppression
finds peaks in the image gradient

Hysteresis thresholding locates edge strings

Edge map

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The Canny edge detector:

• Low error rate of detection

– Well match human perception results
• Good localization of edges
– The distance between actual edges in an image
and the edges found by a computational algorithm
should be minimized
• Single response
– The algorithm should not return multiple edges
pixels when only a single one exists

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The Canny edge detector: Example

original image vertical edges horizontal edges

norm of the gradient after thresholding after thinning

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 The Canny edge detector: Example

Canny Edges
Source: Prem Kalra, R Urtasun, S Fidler

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Edge Detection in OpenCV/ MATLAB
• MATLAB
– edge()

• OpenCV Python
• cv2.canny()
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/image-processing-in-
python-scaling-rotating-shifting-and-edge-detection/

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Practice Problem
Gonzalez, Rafael C., and Richard E. Woods. "Digital Image Processing,
New Jersey.", 2007. 3rd edition.

Example 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.8, 10.9

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Summary
We have looked at:
❑Edge Detection
❑Introduction
❑Detection of Isolated Points
❑Line Detection
❑Edge Models
❑Basic Edge Detection
❑Advanced Edge detection technique
• Marr-Hildreth edge detector
• The Canny edge detector

Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, India

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