Contour Detection by Multiresolution Surround Inhibition

In natural images, luminance changes occur both on object contours and on textures. Often, the latter are stronger than the former, thus standard edge detectors fail in isolating object contours from texture. To overcome this problem, we propose a multiresolution contour detector motivated by biological principles. At each scale, texture is suppressed by using a bipolar surround inhibition process. The binary contour map is obtained by a contour selection criterion that is more effective than the classical hysteresis thresholding. Robustness to noise is achieved by Bayesian gradient estimation.