Talk:Edge detection

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In the practice of digital image enhancement, basing edge detection merely on numerical derivatives is too naive, and unrealistic. For each pixel of a digital image, one wants not only to decide if it is a candidate for membership in an "edge" but also to find the direction of that edge. [In particular, the edge direction is required for true sharpening]. One needs to analize a suitable collection of neighboring pixels (typically, those at horizontal and vertical distances up to 3) with respect to intensity as well as position. Although effective methods of doing this are not very difficult to develop, it seems that commercial software does not provide truly suitable implementations.

Response to unsigned criticism above: Well, edge detection based on image derivatives is not fully naive, subject to the well-known practice of using Gaussian filtering as a pre-processing stage to the computation of image derivatives. This means that the effective support region for image derivative computations are equal to the support regions of first-order Gaussian derivative operators, and thus substantially larger than a distance of three pixels. Moreover, the orientation of an edge within the differential approach to edge detection is given as orthogonal to the orientation of the image gradient as estimated by first-order Gaussian derivative operators. In practice, these approaches have found numerous successful applications in computer vision, however, usually with different goals than mere image enhancement. Tpl

[edit] Add some "why"?

Lot's of technical "how" but not a lot of explanatory "why" for us non-techies. Just a little would be nice Awotter 23:17, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Major restructuring of this article

Following the tag marked in October 2007, I have now made a first attempt to restructure this article to be more updated with respect to the topic of edge detection and also to give more technical details of basic edge detectors. Question to those of you who have tagged this article, do you find it appropriate to remove the tag? Tpl (talk) 16:40, 22 February 2008 (UTC)