Detecting edges in colour images using dichromatic differences

Low level image processing is the first step in many computer vision applications. Edge detection is one of the most useful low level processes and it has been widely studied for grey level images. In some cases, a grey-level edge detector is not rich enough to describe changes that are present in the images and the use of colour information and colour edges may be a valuable tool for some problems. In this paper, we propose an edge detection algorithm based on a distance function in the colour space to measure the perceived difference between two colour vectors. This function is further combined with some concepts of the Canny edge detector to define a novel approach to edge detection in colour images. The experiments carried out show that the proposed method for colour edge detection provides satisfactory results in real colour images