Detecting edges is a fundamental problem in computer vision with many applications, some involving very noisy images. While most edge detection methods are fast, they perform well only on relatively clean images. Indeed, edges in such images can be reliably detected using only local filters. Detecting faint edges under high levels of noise cannot be done locally at the individual pixel level, and requires more sophisticated global processing. Unfortunately, existing methods that achieve this goal are quite slow. In this paper we develop a novel multiscale method to detect curved edges in noisy images. While our algorithm searches for edges over a huge set of candidate curves, it does so in a practical runtime, nearly linear in the total number of image pixels. As we demonstrate experimentally, our algorithm is orders of magnitude faster than previous methods designed to deal with high noise levels. Nevertheless, it obtains comparable, if not better, edge detection quality on a variety of challenging noisy images.
Several recent studies proposed to use matched filters to improve the detection of faint edges. @cite_15 proposed an efficient algorithm for detecting straight edges, requiring @math operations for an input image with @math pixels. An even faster version for detecting long straight edges was proposed in @cite_10 , with sub-linear run-time in the image size. An algorithm for detecting faint edges was proposed by @cite_1 . Relying on the Beamlet data structure @cite_17 , their method applied dynamic programming to a hierarchical, quad-tree partition of the image. The time complexity of their algorithm is @math , which translates into a non-practical runtime of several minutes on typical images.
@cite_1 @cite_15 @cite_10 @cite_17
1539775372 2169027278 2560622558 2135625544
A fundamental question for edge detection is how faint an edge can be and still be detected. In this paper we offer a formalism to study this question and subsequently introduce a hierarchical edge detection algorithm designed to detect faint curved edges in noisy images. In our formalism we view edge detection as a search in a space of feasible curves, and derive expressions to characterize the behavior of the optimal detection threshold as a function of curve length and the combinatorics of the search space. We then present an algorithm that efficiently searches for edges through a very large set of curves by hierarchically constructing difference filters that match the curves traced by the sought edges. We demonstrate the utility of our algorithm in simulations and in applications to challenging real images. We present an algorithm for edge detection suitable for both natural as well as noisy images. Our method is based on efficient multiscale utilization of elongated filters measuring the difference of oriented means of various lengths and orientations, along with a theoretical estimation of the effect of noise on the response of such filters. We use a scale adaptive threshold along with a recursive decision process to reveal the significant edges of all lengths and orientations and to localize them accurately even in low-contrast and very noisy images. We further use this algorithm for fiber detection and enhancement by utilizing stochastic completion-like process from both sides of a fiber. Our algorithm relies on an efficient multiscale algorithm for computing all "significantly different" oriented means in an image in O(N log rho), where N is the number of pixels, and p is the length of the longest structure of interest. Experimental results on both natural and noisy images are presented. Edge detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have pushed forward this field significantly. Existing methods which adopt specific layers of deep CNNs may fail to capture complex data structures caused by variations of scales and aspect ratios. In this paper, we propose an accurate edge detector using richer convolutional features (RCF). RCF encapsulates all convolutional features into more discriminative representation, which makes good usage of rich feature hierarchies, and is amenable to training via backpropagation. RCF fully exploits multiscale and multilevel information of objects to perform the image-to-image prediction holistically. Using VGG16 network, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on several available datasets. When evaluating on the well-known BSDS500 benchmark, we achieve ODS F-measure of 0.811 while retaining a fast speed (8 FPS). Besides, our fast version of RCF achieves ODS F-measure of 0.806 with 30 FPS. We also demonstrate the versatility of the proposed method by applying RCF edges for classical image segmentation. We propose a fast edge-based approach for detection and approximate pose estimation of multiple textureless objects in a single image. The objects are trained from a set of edge maps, each showing one object in one pose. To each scanning window in the input image, the nearest neighbor is found among these training templates by a two-level cascade. The first cascade level, based on a novel edge-based sparse image descriptor and fast search by index table, prunes the majority of background windows. The second level verifies the surviving detection hypotheses by oriented chamfer matching, improved by selecting discriminative edges and by compensating a bias towards simple objects. The method outperforms the state-of-the-art approach by (2012). The processing is near real-time, ranging from 2 to 4 frames per second for the training set size 104.