A pyramidal edge detector based on anisotropic diffusion

A novel approach to diffusion-based edge detection is presented. The method utilizes a multiresolution, multiscale pyramidal structure created via successive anisotropic diffusion and subsampling of the original image. Coarse, low resolution image representations of the anisotropic diffusion pyramid (ADP) guide boundary detection at higher resolutions. The edges computed by this hierarchical technique are resilient to image corruption and reflect features of a desired scale. The ADP edge detector offers the advantages of decreased edge localization error and region merging, as compared to Gaussian-based pyramid edge detectors. The ADP-based approach also improves upon the performance of fixed-resolution anisotropic diffusion in noise and alleviates the need for post-processing such as edge thinning and linking