A novel histogram transformation to improve the performance of thresholding methods in edge detection

摘要

The gradient image is used to detect edge points, and the gradient histogram is a typical case of a uni-modal histogram. It is well-documented that bi-modal thresholding methods (such as the Otsu method) detect edges poorly. Therefore, specific unimodal thresholding methods are used to detect edge points. However, unimodal thresholding methods (such as the Rosin method) sometimes obtain very noisy results. In this paper, we propose a histogram transformation to improve the performance of some thresholding methods. Using the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset, we present quantitative performance results in an edge detection task to show that our transformation improves the performance of the Otsu and Rosin methods. Our histogram transformation can be used by any histogram thresholding method, but the performance of the method, using the transformed histogram, will depend of the criterion used by this method.