Edge location with electrostatic region attractors

This paper describes physically based model for detecting closed edge-contours. According to our model, the magnitude of the Canny edge-gradient represents a raw charge-density. Edge segmentation is realised by considering the damped-motion of charged test-particles in the resulting electric field. The attractor regions of the electric field represent continuous regions that are separated by closed edge-contours. In order to strike a compromise between over and under smoothing the resulting edge-map, we provide a hierarchical algorithm for controlling the dynamics of the region attractors. We illustrate the method on both synthetic and real world data