Edge Detection with a Preprocessing Approach

Abstract

Edge detection is the process of determining where boundaries of objects fall within an image. So far, several standard operators-based methods have been widely used for edge detection. However, due to inherent quality of images, these methods prove ineffective if they are applied without any preprocessing. In this paper, an image preprocessing approach has been adopted in order to get certain parameters that are useful to perform better edge detection with the standard operators-based edge detection methods. The proposed preprocessing approach involves computation of the histogram, finding out the total number of peaks and suppressing irrelevant peaks. From the intensity values corresponding to relevant peaks, threshold values are obtained. From these threshold values, optimal multilevel thresholds are calculated using the Otsu method, then multilevel image segmentation is carried out. Finally, a standard edge detection method can be applied to the resultant segmented image. Simulation results are presented to show that our preprocessed approach when used with a standard edge detection method enhances its performance. It has been also shown that applying wavelet edge detection method to the segmented images, generated through our preprocessing approach, yields the superior performance among other standard edge detection methods.