Fusion of intensity and channel difference for improved colour edge detection

Edge detection, especially from colour images, plays very important roles in many applications for image analysis, segmentation and recognition. In this paper, a new colour-gray mapping method for effective colour edge detection is proposed. From any given colour image C, a gray image D is defined as the accumulative differences between each of its two colour channels, and another gray image R is then obtained by weighting of D and gray intensity image G. Fusion of edges extracted from R and G forms the final results. Comparing with edges detected from traditional colour spaces like RGB, YCbCr and HSV, all using same Canny operator, it seems the proposed method can achieve more effective results from different test images.