A novel edge detection method based on the maximizing objective function

This paper proposes a novel edge detection method for both gray level images and color images. The 3 × 3 mask in the image is considered and two pixel sets S₀ and S₁ in the mask are used to define an objective function. The values of the objective function corresponding to four directions determine the edge intensity and edge direction of each pixel in the mask. After all pixels in the image have been processed, the edge map and direction map are generated. Then we apply the non-maxima suppression method to the edge map and the direction map to extract the edge points. The proposed method can detect the edge successfully, while double edges, thick edges, and speckles can be avoided.