A fractional-order edge detection operator for medical image structure feature extraction

This paper introduces a novel fractional-order gradient operator for medical image structure feature extraction. The proposed operator can be seen as generalization of the first-order Sobel operator based on the GL fractional derivative definition. The generalization goal is to utilize the frequency characteristic of the fractional derivative for extracting more structure feature details. A thresholding is set based on the average fractional-order gradient for marking the edge points, and then the image structure can be extracted. Experiments show that the proposed fractional-order operator yields good visual effects.