Edge Drawing: A Heuristic Approach to Robust Real-Time Edge Detection

We propose a new edge detection algorithm that works by computing a set of anchor edge points in an image and then linking these anchor points by drawing edges between them. The resulting edge map consists of perfect contiguous, one pixel wide edges. The performance tests show that our algorithm is up to 16% faster than the fastest known edge detection algorithm, i.e., OpenCV implementation of the Canny edge detector. We believe that our edge detector is a novel step in edge detection and would be very suitable for the next generation real-time image processing and computer vision applications.