Multi-feature edge detection with scale-rate as the measurement of local image complexity

The scale-rate is proposed as the measurement of local image complexity. It is inspired by the estimation of the box-counting dimension. The definition of scale-rate is based on the idea that the complexity of an object can be reflected by the rate of the change of the object´s measurement with respect to the observing scale. The scale-rate is experimentally proved to be an important feature of image edge areas. Multi-feature edge detection is achieved with the scale-rate and image intensity discontinuity. Experimental results show that the proposed multi-feature method improves the performance of edge detection.