A New Edge Detection Technique and Its Implementation

A new edge detection technique for digital image processing is presented. The technique is viewed as a low-level operator in the context of the more complex problem, that of scene analysis, and a conceptual comparison with some previous edge detectors is done. The new edge detection technique has been implemented and its results are compared with two other edge detection techniques using the same kind of pictures as input data. The software implementation of this new edge detector written in machine language takes 32 s for an image of size 128 by 128 picture elements. The edge detector can be hardware-implemented and such an implementation, for which the estimated processing time will be about half a second, is given in the Appendix.