Edge detection and ridge detection with automatic scale selection Tony Lindeberg Computational Vision and Active Perception Laboratory (CVAP) Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) S-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. http://www.nada.kth.se/˜tony Email:
[email protected] Technical report ISRN KTH/NA/P–96/06–SE, May 1996, Revised August 1998. Int. J. of Computer Vision, vol 30, number 2, 1998. (In press). Shortened version in Proc. CVPR’96, San Francisco, June 1996. Abstract When computing descriptors of image data, the type of information that can be extracted may be strongly dependent on the scales at which the image operators are applied. This article presents a systematic methodology for addressing this problem. A mechanism is presented for automatic selection of scale levels when detecting one-dimensional image features, such as edges and ridges. A novel concept of a scale-space edge is introduced, defined as a connected set of points in scale-space at which: (i) the gradient magnitude assumes a local maximum in the gradient direction, and (ii) a normalized measure of the strength of the edge response is locally maximal over scales. An important consequence of this definition is that it allows the scale levels to vary along the edge. Two specific measures of edge strength are analysed in detail, the gradient magnitude and a differential expression derived from the third-order derivative in the gradient direction. For a certain way of normalizing these differential de- scriptors, by expressing them in terms of so-called γ-normalized derivatives,an immediate consequence of this definition is that the edge detector will adapt its scale levels to the local image structure.