Skip to main content
Log in

A Holistic Approach for Efficient Contour Detection

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
Journal of Computer Science and Technology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Object contours contain important visual information which can be applied to numerous vision tasks. As recent algorithms focus on the accuracy of contour detection, the entailed time complexity is significantly high. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective contour extraction method based on both local cues from pixels and global cues from saliency. Experimental results demonstrate that a good trade-off between accuracy and speed can be achieved by the proposed approach for contour detection.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Martin D R, Fowlkes C, Malik J. Learning to detect natural image boundaries using local brightness, color, and texture cues. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2004, 26(5): 530–549.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Arbeláez P. Boundary extraction in natural images using ultrametric contour maps. In Proc. IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop, June 2006, Article No. 182.

  3. Papari G, Campisi P, Petkov N, Neri A. Contour detection by multiresolution surround inhibition. In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, October 2006, pp.749–752.

  4. Galun M, Basri R, Brandt A. Multiscale edge detection and fiber enhancement using differences of oriented means. In Proc. the 11th IEEE Int. Conf. Computer Vision, October 2007.

  5. Maire M, Arbeláez P, Fowlkes C, Malik J. Using contours to detect and localize junctions in natural images. In Proc. IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 2008.

  6. Arbeláez P, Maire M, Fowlkes C, Malik J. Contour detection and hierarchical image segmentation. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2011, 33(5): 898–916.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Papari G, Petkov N. An improved model for surround suppression by steerable filters and multilevel inhibition with application to contour detection. Pattern Recognition, 2011, 44(9): 1999–2007.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Elder J H, Krupnik A, Johnston L A. Contour grouping with prior models. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2003, 25(6): 661–674.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Mahamud S, Williams L R, Thornber K K, Xu K. Segmentation of multiple salient closed contours from real images. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2003, 25(4): 433–444.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Wang S, Kubota T, Siskind J M, Wang J. Salient closed boundary extraction with ratio contour. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2005, 27(4): 546–561.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Estrada F J, Elder J H. Multi-scale contour extraction based on natural image statistics. In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop, June 2006, Article No. 183.

  12. Estrada F J, Jepson A D. Robust boundary detection with adaptive grouping. In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop, June 2006, Article No. 184.

  13. Stahl J S, Wang S. Globally optimal grouping for symmetric closed boundaries by combining boundary and region information. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2008, 30(3): 395–411.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Stahl J S, Oliver K, Wang S. Open boundary capable edge grouping with feature maps. In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop, June 2008.

  15. Bai X, Yang X, Latecki L J. Detection and recognition of contour parts based on shape similarity. Pattern Recognition, 2008, 41(7): 2189–2199.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Adluru N, Latecki L J. Contour grouping based on contour-skeleton duality. International Journal of Computer Vision, 2009, 83(1): 12–29.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Papari G, Petkov N. Edge and line oriented contour detection: State of the art. Image and Vision Computing, 2011, 29(2/3): 79–103.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Achanta R, Hemami S, Estrada F, Susstrunk S. Frequency-tuned salient region detection. In Proc. IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 2009, pp.1597–1604.

  19. Cheng M M, Zhang G X, Mitra N J, Huang X, Hu S M. Global contrast based salient region detection. In Proc. the 24th IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 2011, pp. 409–416.

  20. Cheng M M, Warrell J, Lin W Y, Zheng S, Vineet V, Crook N. E±cient salient region detection with soft image abstraction. In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, December 2013, pp.1529–1536.

  21. Cheng M M, Mitra N J, Huang X, Torr P H, Hu S M. Salient object detection and segmentation. Image, 2011, 2(3): 9.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Martin D, Fowlkes C, Tal D, Malik J. A database of human segmented natural images and its application to evaluating segmentation algorithms and measuring ecological statistics. In Proc. the 8th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, July 2001, Vol.2, pp.416–423.

  23. Roberts L G. Machine perception of three-dimensional solids [Ph.D. Thesis]. Department of Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1963.

  24. Duda R O, Hart P E. Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis. New York, USA: Wiley, 1973.

  25. Prewitt J M. Object enhancement and extraction. Picture Processing and Psychopictorics, 1970, 10(1): 15–19.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Canny J. A computational approach to edge detection. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 1986, 8(6): 679–698.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Marr D, Hildreth E. Theory of edge detection. In Proc. the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences, 1980, 207(1167): 187–217.

  28. Perona P, Malik J. Detecting and localizing edges composed of steps, peaks and roofs. In Proc. the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, December 1990, pp.52–57.

  29. Morrone M C, Owens R A. Feature detection from local energy. Pattern Recognition Letters, 1987, 6(5): 303–313.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Lindeberg T. Edge detection and ridge detection with automatic scale selection. International Journal of Computer Vision, 1998, 30(2): 117–156.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Mairal J, Leordeanu M, Bach F, Hebert M, Ponce J. Discriminative sparse image models for class-specific edge detection and image interpretation. In Proc. the 10th European Conference on Computer Vision, October 2008, pp.43–56.

  32. Dollar P, Tu Z, Belongie S. Supervised learning of edges and object boundaries. In Proc. IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 2006, Vol.2, pp.1964–1971.

  33. Ren X. Multi-scale improves boundary detection in natural images. In Proc. the 10th European Conference on Computer Vision, October 2008, pp.533–545.

  34. Ren X, Fowlkes C, Malik J. Scale-invariant contour completion using conditional random fields. In Proc. the 10th IEEE Int. Conf. Computer Vision, October 2005, pp.1214–1221.

  35. Felzenszwalb P, McAllester D. A min-cover approach for finding salient curves. In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop, June 2006, Article No. 185.

  36. Zhu Q, Song G, Shi J. Untangling cycles for contour grouping. In Proc. the 11th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2007.

  37. Hata M, Toyoura M, Mao X. Automatic generation of accentuated pencil drawing with saliency map and LIC. The Visual Computer, 2012, 28(6/7/8): 657–668.

  38. Swami M, Karuppiah M. Optimal feature extraction using greedy approach for random image components and subspace approach in face recognition. Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2013, 28(2): 322–328.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Tomasi C, Manduchi R. Bilateral filtering for gray and color images. In Proc. the 6th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, January 1998, pp.839-846.

  40. Kiranyaz S, Ferreira M, Gabbouj M. Automatic object extraction over multiscale edge field for multimedia retrieval. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2006, 15(12): 3759–3772.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  41. Rubner Y, Tomasi C, Guibas L J. A metric for distributions with applications to image databases. In Proc. the 6th IEEE Int. Conf. Computer Vision, January 1998, pp.59-66.

  42. Ruzon M A, Tomasi C. Color edge detection with the compass operator. In Proc. IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 1999, Vol.2, pp.160–166.

  43. Shechtman E, Irani M. Matching local self-similarities across images and videos. In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 2007.

  44. Lim J J, Zitnick C L, Dollár P. Sketch tokens: A learned mid-level representation for contour and object detection. In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 2013, pp.3158–3165.

  45. Dollár P, Zitnick C L. Structured forests for fast edge detection. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Computer Vision, December 2013, pp.1841–1848

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hong Cheng.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

ESM 1

(PDF 69 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Cheng, H., Chen, L. A Holistic Approach for Efficient Contour Detection. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 29, 1038–1047 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-014-1488-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-014-1488-8

Keywords

Navigation