Edge Orientation Using Contour Stencils

Overview & Synopsis

Many image processing applications require estimating the orientation of the image edges. This estimation is often done with a finite difference approximation of the orthogonal gradient. As an alternative, we apply contour stencils, a method for detecting contours from total variation along curves, and show it more robustly estimates the edge orientations than several finite difference approximations. Contour stencils are demonstrated in image enhancement and zooming applications.