Physics-inspired image edge detection

We describe a new computational approach to edge detection. Our digital algorithm emulates propagation of light through a physical medium with specific nonlinear diffractive property. The method uses the phase profile of the output complex-amplitude image to identify the edges with different strength in a digital image. This technique is related to the recently introduced Discrete Anamorphic Stretch Transform in which the magnitude of a similar transform was used for image compression. Experimental results shown here prove edge detection with excellent performance.