Context dependent edge detection

To obtain the optimal use of context, an edge detection scheme is introduced which uses the context of the whole image. The edge context for each pixel is the set of all row-monotonically-increasing paths through the pixel. The edge detector assigns to a pixel the edge state having the highest edge probability among all the paths. Experiments indicate the validity of the edge detector. A comparison with the performance of the context-free second-directional derivative zero-crossing edge operator shows that the context-dependent edge detector is superior