Edge detection based on regulated morphological gradient

The morphological gradient transform is a common way to detect both sharp and transition edges, but it tends to result in thick edges. A regulated morphological gradient method for edge detection is proposed, decaying to the Soille multi-scale gradient, while opening by reconstruction top-hat is used to replace the traditional top-hat and ultimate erosion to replace erosion. First, the morphological thick gradient is calculated, and then top-hat by reconstruction and ultimate erosion are employed to extract thin edges with less essential edges lost and to avoid the merging of small spaced edges. Experiments show that this method can efficiently detect thin edges without lost essential edges and edge point position bias under the noiseless case; also it can result in good edges in the noise corrupted condition when a prefilter is employed.