Efficient, high-quality image contour detection

Image contour detection is fundamental to many image analysis applications, including image segmentation, object recognition and classification. However, highly accurate image contour detection algorithms are also very computationally intensive, which limits their applicability, even for offline batch processing. In this work, we examine efficient parallel algorithms for performing image contour detection, with particular attention paid to local image analysis as well as the generalized eigensolver used in Normalized Cuts. Combining these algorithms into a contour detector, along with careful implementation on highly parallel, commodity processors from Nvidia, our contour detector provides uncompromised contour accuracy, with an F-metric of 0.70 on the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset. Runtime is reduced from 4 minutes to 1.8 seconds. The efficiency gains we realize enable high-quality image contour detection on much larger images than previously practical, and the algorithms we propose are applicable to several image segmentation approaches. Efficient, scalable, yet highly accurate image contour detection will facilitate increased performance in many computer vision applications.