Parallel Algorithms for Edge Detection in an Image

Edge detection is an important process in image segmentation, object recognition, template matching, etc. It computes gradients in both horizontal and vertical directions of the image at each pixel position to find the image boundaries. The conventional edge detectors take significant time to detect the edges in the image. To reduce the computational time, this paper proposes parallel algorithms for edge detection with Sobel, Prewitt and Robert first order derivatives using a Shared Memory - Single Instruction Multiple Data (SM - SIMD) parallel architecture. From the experimental results, it is inferred that the proposed parallel algorithms for edge detection are faster than the conventional methods.