Ieee transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, vol. pami-8, no. 6,

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PATTERN ANALYSIS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE, VOL. PAMI-8, NO. 6,

NOVEMBER 1986

679

A Computational Approach to Edge Detection
JOHN CANNY, MEMBER, IEEE
Abstract-This paper describes a computational approach to edge detection. The success of the approach depends on the definition of a comprehensive set of goals for the computation of edge points. These goals must beprecise enough to delimit the desired behavior of the detector while making minimal assumptions about the form of the solution. We define detection and localization criteria for a class of edges, and present mathematical forms for these criteria as functionals on the operator impulse response. A third criterion is then added to ensure that the detector has only one response to- a single edge. We usethe criteria in numerical optimization to derive detectors for several common image features, including step edges. On specializing the analysis to step edges, we find that there is a natural uncertainty principle between detection and localization performance, which are the two main goals. With this principle we derive a single operator shape which is optimal at any scale. The optimal detectorhas a simple approximate implementation in which edges are marked at maxima in gradient magnitude of a Gaussian-smoothed image. We extend this simple detector using operators of several widths to cope with different signal-to-noise ratios in the image. We present a general method, called feature synthesis, for the fine-to-coarse integration of information from operators at different scales. Finallywe show that step edge detector performance improves considerably as the operator point spread function is extended along the edge. This detection scheme uses several elongated operators at each point, and the directional operator outputs are integrated with the gradient maximum detector.
Index Terms-Edge detection, feature extraction, image processing, machine vision, multiscale image analysis.I. INTRODUCTION

EDGE detectors of some kind, particularly step edge detectors, have been an essential part of many computer vision systems. The edge detection process serves to simplify the analysis of images by drastically reducing the amount of data to be processed, while at the same time preserving useful structural information about object boundaries. There is certainly a great deal ofdiversity in the applications of edge detection, but it is felt that many applications share a common set of requirements. These requirements yield an abstract edge detection problem, the solution of which can be applied in any of the original problem domains. We should mention some specific applications here. The Binford-Horn line finder [14] used the output of an edge
Manuscript receivedDecember 10, 1984; revised November 27, 1985. Recommended for acceptance by S. L. Tanimoto. This work was supported in part by the System Development Foundation, in part by the Office of Naval Research under Contract N00014-81 -K-0494, and in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency under Office of Naval Research Contracts N00014-80-C-0505 and N00014-82-K-0334. The author is with the ArtificialIntelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139. IEEE Log Number 8610412.

detector as input to a program which could isolate simple geometric solids. More recently the model-based vision system ACRONYM [3] used an edge detector as the front end to a sophisticated recognition program. Shape from motion [29], [13] can be used to infer the structure ofthree-dimensional objects from the motion of edge contours or edge points in the image plane. Several modem theories of stereopsis assume that images are preprocessed by an edge detector before matching is done [19], [20]. Beattie [1] describes an edge-based labeling scheme for low-level image understanding. Finally, some novel methods have been suggested for the extraction of threedimensional information...