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Concept
Sobel operator
Summary
The Sobel operator, sometimes called the Sobel–Feldman operator or Sobel filter, is used in and computer vision, particularly within edge detection algorithms where it creates an image emphasising edges. It is named after Irwin Sobel and Gary M. Feldman, colleagues at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Sobel and Feldman presented the idea of an "Isotropic 3 × 3 Image Gradient Operator" at a talk at SAIL in 1968. Technically, it is a discrete differentiation operator, computing an approximation of the of the image intensity function. At each point in the image, the result of the Sobel–Feldman operator is either the corresponding gradient vector or the norm of this vector. The Sobel–Feldman operator is based on convolving the image with a small, separable, and integer-valued filter in the horizontal and vertical directions and is therefore relatively inexpensive in terms of computations. On the other hand, the gradient approximation that it produces is relatively crude, in particular for high-frequency variations in the image.
The operator uses two 3×3 kernels which are with the original image to calculate approximations of the – one for horizontal changes, and one for vertical. If we define A as the source image, and Gx and Gy are two images which at each point contain the horizontal and vertical derivative approximations respectively, the computations are as follows:
where here denotes the 2-dimensional signal processing operation.
Since the Sobel kernels can be decomposed as the products of an averaging and a differentiation
kernel, they compute the gradient with smoothing. For example, can be written as
The x-coordinate is defined here as increasing in the "right"-direction, and the y-coordinate is defined as increasing in the "down"-direction. At each point in the image, the resulting gradient approximations can be combined to give the gradient magnitude, using:
Using this information, we can also calculate the gradient's direction:
where, for example, is 0 for a vertical edge which is lighter on the right side (for see atan2).
Official source
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Prewitt operator
The Prewitt operator is used in , particularly within edge detection algorithms. Technically, it is a discrete differentiation operator, computing an approximation of the of the image intensity function. At each point in the image, the result of the Prewitt operator is either the corresponding gradient vector or the norm of this vector. The Prewitt operator is based on convolving the image with a small, separable, and integer valued filter in horizontal and vertical directions and is therefore relatively inexpensive in terms of computations like Sobel and Kayyali operators.
Feature (computer vision)
In computer vision and , a feature is a piece of information about the content of an image; typically about whether a certain region of the image has certain properties. Features may be specific structures in the image such as points, edges or objects. Features may also be the result of a general neighborhood operation or feature detection applied to the image. Other examples of features are related to motion in image sequences, or to shapes defined in terms of curves or boundaries between different image regions.
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The Canny edge detector is an edge detection operator that uses a multi-stage algorithm to detect a wide range of edges in images. It was developed by John F. Canny in 1986. Canny also produced a computational theory of edge detection explaining why the technique works. Canny edge detection is a technique to extract useful structural information from different vision objects and dramatically reduce the amount of data to be processed. It has been widely applied in various computer vision systems.