Global sampling of image edges

An algorithm for sampling image edge points is presented. At first, the image edges are summarized by line segments, which represent the long axis of highly eccentric ellipses. Then, each line segment is partitioned into a number of bins and the point which is closer to the center of the bin is selected. Experiments on widely used databases demonstrate that the proposed method is accurate and provides samples that preserve the coherence of the initial information of the edge map, which is of importance in image retrieval applications.