A Pre-processing Step for Efficient Edge Extraction

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a pre-processing step for an efficient edge extraction technique that takes input as an original image to generate an edge map. Generated edge maps could be inputted for state-of-art traditional edge detection algorithms like Canny, Sobel, Prewitt, and recent edge detection algorithms gb-UCM, CED Contours, Structured forest, Sparse Code Gradients and CNN based edge detection Deep Edge, N4 to get better performance. Further, the proposed algorithm has not required any training or learning to improve the edge detection method and is not depending on any parameters. Visual experiments and quantitative evaluation results show that our proposed algorithm greatly improves the modal quality of edge/edge maps. It preserves the original shape, structure of the objects and local features, which presents in an input image. The proposed method takes very less amount of time to execute and making it more suitable for real-time image processing and computer vision applications that depend on edge like classification, object localization, object recognition, image retrieval, segmentation, shape representation.