Efficient image contour detection using edge prior

An effective and efficient image contour detector is highly desired due to its wide applications in computer vision and multimedia retrieval. However, the state-of-the-art image contour detection algorithms are very computationally intensive, and thus impractical for web-scale applications. In this work, we study the relationship between edge detection and contour detection, based on which an edge-based image contour detection algorithm is proposed. This algorithm fully makes use of cheap edge information for efficiency purpose. The experiments on benchmark data sets show that, the proposed contour detector works much faster than existing state-of-the-art algorithms while maintaining high accuracy, and thus suitable for large-scale applications.