Parameter optimal determination for canny edge detection

Abstract

The Canny edge detection algorithm contains a number of adjustable parameters, which can affect the computation time and effectiveness of the algorithm. To overcome the shortages, this paper proposes a new way to determine the adjustable parameters and constructs a modified Canny edge detection algorithm. In the algorithm, an image is firstly smoothed by an adaptive filter that is selected based on the properties of the image, instead of a fixed sized Gaussian filter, and then, the high and low thresholds for the gradient magnitude image are determined based on maximum cross-entropy between inter-classes and Bayesian judgment theory, without any manual operation; finally, if it needs, the object closing procedure is carried out. To test and evaluate the algorithm, a number of different images are tested and analysed, and the test results are discussed. The experiments show that the studied algorithm can achieve the better edge detection results in most of the cases, and it is also useful for object boundary closing as a pre-segmentation step.

Keywords:

• Bayesian
• adaptive
• cross-entropy
• boundary closing
• Canny
• edge detection

This work was supported in part by the New Century Excellent Talents plan projects (no. NCET-05-0849) and the National Natural Science Foundation (nos. 50978030 and 60873186).