Contour Detection Based on Center-Surround Contrast

A contour edge detector based on center-surround contrast is proposed in this paper.Specifically, the detector follows the flow of the Canny edge detector while using center-surround contrast instead of gradient magnitude to detect contour edges. Firstly, image gradient is computed in the same way as the traditional Canny detector. Secondly, center-surround contrast is computed using gradient information. Finally, contour map is constructed from center-surround contrast through non-maxima suppression and hysteresis thrsholding procedures. Performance comparison with two other edge detectors is made and the experimental results show that our contour edge detection method performs better.