Texture Edge Detection Using the Compass Operator

The compass operator has proven to be a useful tool for the detection of color edges in real images. Its fundamental contribution is the comparison of oriented distributions of image features over a local area at each pixel. This paper presents extensions and modifications to the operator to make it applicable to texture edge detection in high dimensional images whose dimensions represent the output of a texture filter bank. The results show that the extended compass operator can robustly locate edges in natural scenes with complex textures. In addition, the use of a dynamic time warping distribution matching metric and jittered application of the operator improves the computational running time by a factor of over 50 while still producing comparable results. This large-scale speedup makes application of the algorithm to an entire image database computationally feasible.