888
6, JUNE 1997
constraint. Both the PPSNR and the visual quality are improved. In
addition the method reduces the artifacts in postprocessing such as
edge detection. Furthermore, this approach requires only a simple
modification to the compression scheme and a low excess of com-
puting. The decoder scheme is exactly the same as in the standard
JPEG. The proposed array is incorporated in the bitstream instead of
the standard default array.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank the reviewers both for their helpful comments
and suggestions.
REFERENCES
[1] W. B. Pennebaker and J. L. Mitchell, JPEG Still Image Data Compres-
sion Standard. New York: Van Nostrand, 1993.
[2] H. C. Reeve and J. S. Lim, “Reduction of blocking effects in image
coding,” Opt. Eng., vol. 23, pp. 34–37, Jan./Feb. 1984.
[3] A. Baskurt, R. Prost, and R. Goutte, “Iterative constrained restoration
of DCT-compressed images,” Signal Processing, vol. 17, pp. 201–211,
1989.
[4] Y. Yang, N. P. Galatsanos, and A. K. Katsaggelos, “Regularized recon-
struction to reduce blocking artifacts of block discrete cosine transform
compressed images,” IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol., vol. 3,
pp. 421–432, Dec. 1993.
[5] K. Miller, “Least squares methods for ill-posed problems with a pre-
scribed bound,” SIAM J. Math. Anal., vol. 1, pp. 52–74, Feb. 1970.
[6] B. Chitprasert and K. R. Rao, “Discrete cosine transform filtering,”
Signal Processing, vol. 19, pp. 233–245, 1990.
[7] A. K. Katsaggelos, J. Biemond, R. W. Schafer, and R. M. Mersereau, “A
regularized iterative image restoration algorithm,” IEEE Trans. Signal
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[8] Z. Wang, “Fast algorithm for discrete W transform and for the discrete
Fourier transform,” IEEE Trans. Acoust., Speech, Signal Processing, vol.
ASSP-32, pp. 803–816, Aug. 1984.
[9] R. Deriche, “Using Canny’s criteria to derive a recursively implemented
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1987.
1057–7149/97$10.00  1997 IEEE
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 6, NO.
Image Enhancement Based on
a Nonlinear Multiscale Method
Farook Sattar, Lars Floreby, Göran Salomonsson,
and Benny Lövström
Abstract—An image enhancement method that reduces speckle noise
and preserves edges is introduced. The method is based on a new non-
linear multiscale reconstruction scheme that is obtained by successively
combining each coarser scale image with the corresponding modified
interscale image. Simulation results are included to demonstrate the
performance of the proposed method.
I. INTRODUCTION
In many imaging systems, there is noise that is inherently signal
dependent. One kind of such noise is speckle, which, e.g., appears in
acoustic and laser imaging and which is often modeled by a random
process. Noise in images can be suppressed by conventional linear or
nonlinear filtering. Linear techniques are simple but blur the edges
and have a poor performance in the presence of signal-dependent
noise [1]. One nonlinear method is the Nagao filter [2], which uses
masks of different shapes in order to find the neighborhood of least
variance, after which a local mean is computed using the selected
masks.
When dealing with signal and image processing problems, it
is often attractive to perform a multiscale decomposition where
a sequence of approximations at successively coarser resolution
is generated. Such a scheme is mathematically described by the
dyadic wavelet transform [3], in which a series expansion of the
signal represents the approximation at a resolution being a power
of two. The difference in information between approximations at
two consecutive resolutions, the detail signal, can be represented
by another series expansion. The reversal of the multiresolution
decomposition, i.e., reconstruction, is the synthesis form of the
scheme, where a finer representation is constructed via coarse-
to-fine scale recursion. The multiresolution representation can be
implemented as a subband coding scheme, in which a quadrature
mirror filter (QMF) pair gives the lowpass and detail signals. Another
implementation scheme is the multiresolution pyramid [4], in which
the detail signal at one particular resolution is obtained by subtracting
the lowpass signal from the original. Thus, such a scheme requires
no QMF filter pair.
In this correspondence, we introduce a multiscale image enhance-
ment method that reduces speckle noise while the sharpness of edges
is preserved. The method is based on pyramid reconstruction where,
at each resolution, the output from the previous stage is interpolated
and combined with a modified version of the interscale (detail) image.
The significance of edges as information bearing highpass features
in images has been emphasized by Graham [5]. Useful information
having a high-frequency content should therefore be preserved in
the reconstruction while noise should be suppressed. In our scheme,
edge detection is applied to each lowpass image, thus introducing
Manuscript received July 5, 1995; revised July 19, 1996. The associate
editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for
publication was Prof. Moncef Gabbouj.
F. Sattar, L. Floreby, and G. Salomonsson are with the Department of
Applied Electronics, Signal Processing Group, Lund University, S-221 00
Lund, Sweden (e-mails: fs@tde.lth.se; lf@tde.lth.se; gs@tde.lth.se).
B. Lövström is with the Department of Signal Processing, Uni-
versity of Karlskrona/Ronneby, S-372 25 Ronneby, Sweden (e-mail:
Benny.Lovstrom@isb.hk-r.se).
Publisher Item Identifier S 1057-7149(97)03894-3.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 6, NO. 6, JUNE 1997
Fig. 1. One decomposition and one reconstruction stage in multiresolution
pyramid.
nonlinearity to the method. The binary edge image is then used for
selecting which pixels of the interscale image to be retained. Three
different approaches to edge detection are used: the Laplacian-of-
Gaussian (LoG) based (linear) technique [1], the ratio-of-averages
(RoA) method [6], and finally a new scheme based on a variance-
weighted mean estimator (VWME).
An artificial test image degraded by speckle is used in order to
illustrate the performance. Quantitative measures are presented for
comparison between different enhancement methods. In this context,
the performances of the average filter and the Nagao filter are
presented. Furthermore, the method is applied to real ultrasonic
images acquired from measurements on a phantom and also from
echocardiographic scanning.
II. THE NONLINEAR MULTISCALE METHOD
A. Pyramid Decomposition and Reconstruction
The multiscale decomposition of a two-dimensional (2-D) signal,
such as an image, can be carried out by using separable filters
derived from horizontally and vertically directed one-dimensional
(1-D) filters. Although this method has the advantage of requiring
only 1-D filters, it has one major disadvantage for the current purpose:
The image is decomposed into one lower resolution image and
three interscale images, which all represent different components
of the detail information. Moreover, separable filters emphasize the
importance of the horizontal and vertical directions at the expense
of other directions.
Feauveau proposed a multiscale scheme which has the sharpness
of the separable dyadic wavelets, but which does not suffer from their
disadvantages [7]. The method creates a multiresolution pyramid by
p
iteratively applying a nonseparable lowpass filter and subsampling
the output by a factor of 2 in each dimension. The subsampling
operation is achieved by retaining every second pixel in the image.
In order to make the pixels of the lower resolution image fit to the
Cartesian grid, subsampling includes rotation of the image by 45 .
In Fig. 1, one decomposition stage in the multiresolution pyramid
is shown together with the corresponding reconstruction stage. The
lower resolution image um is acquired by applying the lowpass filter
g to the image um01 and subsampling the output. The coarser image,
um , is interpolated to give the image am , with the same size as um01 ,
but containing only its lowpass information. The interscale image is
889
(a)
(b)
Fig. 2. (a) Structure of the multiresolution pyramid and (b) illustration of
decomposition into lowpass and detail images.
given by the difference dm = um01 0 am . A perfect reconstruction of
the original image can be achieved by interpolating the low-resolution
image component and adding it to the interscale component. In this
case, the dashed parts of Fig. 1 are discarded and the elements of
wm are set to one.
Multiscale decomposition and reconstruction is sketched schemati-
cally in Fig. 2(a). Iterative decomposition in four stages is illustrated
by Fig. 2(b). In contrast to the algorithm given by Feauveau, the size
of each interscale image is equal to that of the input image to the
corresponding decomposition stage. This approach is less economic
in terms of data storage, but it leads to a perfect reconstruction with
few filter demands: No matching highpass filter is needed and the
lowpass filter does not have to be halfband. Moreover, we can process
the interscale image without introducing aliasing after reconstruction.
B. The Modified Reconstruction Scheme
An interscale image can be assumed to contain both noise and the
outlines of objects. Moreover, an object that covers a large number of
pixels has a frequency content that is essentially lowpass. Therefore,
most of its edge information is preserved when the image is subject to
decimation. Thus, it can be said that it is easier to detect the boundary
of an object in an image of low resolution, because the noise variance
is lower (although the localization of the edges is less precise, or the
edges have a larger width). These observations lead to a modification
of the reconstruction process for the purpose of image enhancement.
The modified scheme for one reconstruction stage is obtained by
including the dashed parts in Fig. 1. A binary mask, wm , at the
mth scale is determined as the result from edge detection applied
to the interpolated lowpass component (a ~m ). Its pixel value is 1 if
the corresponding pixel in a~m is determined to belong to an edge, 0
otherwise. Thus, wm indicates the part of the image where the useful
high-frequency components (edges) are preserved. Finally, interscale
image dm is multiplied by wm to remove the noise located inside
890
(a)
(c)
Fig. 3. Filter design. (a) Passband support of the desired filter. (b) Frequency response of the designed filter. (c) Coefficients of the filter g (n1 ;
homogeneous regions and we obtain the output from reconstruction
using the modified interscale image.
C. Filter Design
Using the frequency sampling method [1], the desired frequency
response, Gd (!1 ; !2 ), (!1 ; !2 2 [0; ]), is sampled at equally
spaced points yielding Gd (k1 ; k2 ), 0  k1 , k2  (N 0 1) (N is
even). Fig. 3(a) shows for Gd (k1 ; k2 ) the diamond-shaped passband,
transition band, and stopband (marked by “1,” “1/2,” and “0,”
respectively) in the frequency plane. The filter is designed to prevent
aliasing and its passband is given by j!1 j + j!2 j 2 [0;  0 2M=N ],
where M (0  M  N=2) is an integer [see Fig. 3(a)].
The desired impulse response, gd (n1 ; n2 ), is defined as the in-
verse discrete Fourier transform of Gd (k1 ; k2 ). In order to get a
computationally more manageable filter, gd (n1 ; n2 ) is approximated
using a Hamming window of size L 2 L (L  N ). In our case, the
parameters are set to N = 96, M = 16, and L = 11. Fig. 3(b) shows
the frequency response of the lowpass filter whereas the coefficients
of the corresponding filter are given in Fig. 3(c).
D. Edge Detectors
A step edge in an image is defined as the transition between
regions of different intensities [8]. Here, edge detection is used
only in order to determine which pixels in each interscale image
to include in the corresponding reconstruction stage. For each stage
p image decomposition, the resolution is decreased by a factor
in the
of 2 in each spatial dimension. As the resolution is decreased,
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 6, NO. 6, JUNE 1997
(b)
n2 ) .
the number of pixels used for representing the image is decreased
by the corresponding factor. Thus, using the same edge detector for
all stages, the spatial precision relative to an object’s size is varied
through the multiresolution pyramid.
For the linear edge detector [1], edges can be defined as the zero
crossings of the output when an image is filtered through a LoG filter.
It corresponds to a bandpass filter, whose passband is determined by
the spatial dispersion, G , of the underlying Gaussian pulse. Among
linear filters, it can be said to have the best ability to localize edges
at a given scale. In our algorithm, the images are convolved by
a sampled version of the LoG filter and the zero crossings of the
output are declared to be edges only when the brightness gradient’s
magnitude exceeds a threshold.
The second edge detector uses the RoA as a measure of the contrast
between different image regions. Within the processing window, a
median line is defined by the center row, column, or diagonal. The
average gray level on each side of each such line is computed,
and the maximum ratio is selected. In Fig. 4, the regions in which
the averages are computed are marked by “A” and “B,” while the
pixels of the median lines are marked by filled circles. Making
some assumptions about the image statistics, the threshold selection
problem can be considered equivalent to setting a constant false alarm
ratio (CFAR). Using this approach, however, one can only expect to
detect an edge delimiting two regions if the contrast between them
significantly exceeds the selected threshold.
The third method for constructing the mask wm is based on a new
nonlinear edge detection technique. It uses VWME carried out in
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 6, NO. 6, JUNE 1997 891

Fig. 4. Regions in which averages are computed for the 3 2 3-pixel RoA
edge detector.

a square window centered at pixel (n1 ; n2 ). The pixels within the

window are arranged into eight groups, fx(n1 0 i; n2 0 j )j(i; j ) 2
sp g; p = 1; 2; 1 1 1 ; 8, where sp are the subsets of the window as
indicated in Fig. 5. The mean of the image intensity in subset number
p is denoted by p (n1 ; n2 ), while the corresponding sample variance
is denoted by p2 (n1 ; n2 ).
The variance-weighted mean estimate is now given by
8
bp (n1 ; n2 )p (n1 ; n2 )
VWME (n1 ; n2 ) =
p=1

8
(1)
bp (n1 ; n2 )
p=1

where bp (n1 ; n2 ) = 1=p2 (n1 ; n2 ). In the degenerate case where p2

approaches zero for some p, (1) should be interpreted in the limit
sense. For edge detection, VWME (n1 ; n2 ) is compared with the
arithmetic mean, AM (n1 ; n2 ) computed over the entire window.
If the window lies in a homogeneous region, the VWME performs
similar to an arithmetic mean operator. If an edge, on the other hand,
is included in the window, the weights of the window vary due to
the abrupt change in the variance, and the edge can be located.
For each pixel (n1 ; n2 ), the decision statistics is given by
R(n1 ; n2 ) = ln [VWME (n1 ; n2 )] 0 ln [AM (n1 ; n2 )]. In a
homogeneous region, this quantity can be expected to be close to
zero, which is not the case, e.g., at an edge. Thus, the mask elements
are set to one for those pixels whose magnitudes exceed a threshold.
III. SIMULATION RESULTS
A. Test Image and Noise Model
Ultrasonic speckle can be modeled as the result when a number
of independent random-phase scatterings are accumulated coherently
at the transducer face [9]. These scatterings originate from inhomo-
geneities of size comparable to the wavelength of the ultrasound and
their density in a particular region determines the average speckle
magnitude. From a reference image containing different constant-
level regions, a speckle image is thus obtained after multiplication
by a random field with unit mean.
A simulated speckle image is represented as
I (n1 ; n2 ) = s(n1 ; n2 ) 1 v(n1 ; n2 )
where s(n1 ; n2 ) is the reference image and v (n1 ; n2 ) is a ran-
dom process representing the variations in speckle amplitude. The
256 2 256-pixel reference image s(n1 ; n2 ) shown in Fig. 6(a) is
generated as follows. A 45 rotated square, a ring, a rectangle,
and a solid rectangle having gray levels 100, 150, 175, and 200,
respectively, are placed at different locations in the image. Near the
image border, there is a stripe with gray level 200. The background
gray level is set to 50.
The gray level at one point in a speckle image is modeled to be
Rayleigh distributed while its second-order behavior is described by a
spatial autocorrelation function, which can be derived from a model
or estimated from measured data. We generate spatially correlated
speckle noise v (n1 ; n2 ) by lowpass filtering a complex Gaussian
random field and taking the magnitude of the filtered output. The
speckle image I (n1 ; n2 ) is shown in Fig. 6(b). Since the local aver-
Fig. 5. Window of size 5 2 5 used in the VWME approach.
age of the speckle image in a homogeneous region approximates the
reference image, the latter can be used in quantitative comparisons.
The image obtained from the speckle model can be said to simulate
a cross section containing regions with various scatterer densities.
A region with different speckle magnitude can thus represent, e.g.,
a lesion in a medical echogram. Thus, the test image of Fig. 6(b)
contains no specular echoes from any boundaries, but the objects are
completely defined by their different speckle levels. The point signal-
to-noise ratio (SNR) of a speckle image has been defined and, in the
case of fully developed speckle, it equals 1.91 (5.63 dB) [9].
B. Quality Measures
For the quantitative evaluation, a region of interest (ROI) is
selected in the test image. This ROI has size 206 2 128 pixels and is
marked in Fig. 6(a). As a measure of speckle suppression, the mean
square error (MSE) is perhaps the one closest at hand. Relating it to
the reference signal’s energy, we obtain the output SNR, which in its
“pointwise normalized” version is given by
Number of pixels in ROI
SNRout =
1 0 s^(i; j )
(3)
(i; j )2ROI
s(i; j )2
(2) where s^(i; j ) is the estimated pixel intensity. This quantity has
the property to give every pixel in the image equal importance,
irrespective of the corresponding gray-level value in the reference
image.
The SNR is not always an accurate measure of noise suppression in
images, since it does not well reflect, e.g., the preservation of edges.
Therefore, we propose a supplementary performance evaluation based
on correlation. Thus, as a measure of the noise suppression, we use
=
0(s 0 s; s^ 0 s^) (4)
0(s 0 s; s 0 s) 1 0(^s 0 s^; s^ 0 s^)
where s(i; j ) and s^(i; j ) are mean values in the ROI of s(i; j ) and
s^(i; j ), respectively, and
0(s1 ; s2 ) = s1 (i; j ) 1 s2 (i; j ): (5)
(i; j )2ROI
892 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 6, NO. 6, JUNE 1997

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

(e) (f)

Fig. 6. Simulation results. (a) Reference image. (b) Corresponding speckle image. (c) Image enhanced by the multiscale method (LoG approach). (d) Image
enhanced by the multiscale method (RoA approach). (e) Image enhanced by the multiscale method (VWME approach). (f) Image enhanced by the Nagao filter.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 6, NO. 6, JUNE 1997 893

(a)

(b) (c)

(d) (e)
Fig. 7. (a) Map of the region of the phantom used. (b) Measured echographic image of phantom. (c) Image after multiscale enhancement (LoG approach).
(d) Image after multiscale enhancement (RoA approach). (e) Image after multiscale enhancement (VWME approach).

Furthermore, as a measure of the edge preservation, we use correlation measures of (4) and (6) should be high, i.e., close to unity

= 0(1s 0 1s; 1s 0 1s) (6)

when the estimated image is similar to the reference image.

0(1s 0 1s; 1s 0 1s) 1 0(1s 0 1s; 1s 0 1s) C. Results

where 1s(i; j) is a highpass filtered version of s(i; j), obtained with The test image of Fig. 6(b) was enhanced by using the present
a3 2 3-pixel standard approximation of the Laplacian operator. The multiscale method with the three described approaches to edge
894
(a)
(c)
Fig. 8. (a) Echocardiographic image. (b) Image after multiscale enhancement (LoG approach). (c) Image after multiscale enhancement (RoA approach).
(d) Image after multiscale enhancement (VWME approach).
detection. The images resulting from five-stage reconstruction are
shown in Fig. 6(c)–(e).
For the LoG-based (linear) edge detector, we used G = 1:0,
which implies a “reasonably” small amount of aliasing. By truncating
this filter to 7 2 7 pixels, less than 0.003% of its energy was
discarded. The zero crossings of the filtered image were defined as
those pixels, for which the 4-neighbors indicated a simple sign shift.
To be declared an edge, the image gradient magnitude also had to
exceed a global threshold. The latter was automatically selected at
each scale as the first local minimum of the smoothed histogram.
The resulting image is shown in Fig. 6(c). In fact, we have found
that a 3 2 3-pixel standard approximation of the Laplacian [1] yields
results comparable to those of the LoG filter.
A window of size 3 2 3 pixels was used with the RoA edge
detector. Thus, three-pixel neighborhoods were compared pairwise
and edges were declared if the maximum ratio exceeded the threshold
TRoA = 2:0. The result of image enhancement is shown in Fig. 6(d).
The value of the threshold, 2.0, was equal to the ratio between the
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 6, NO. 6, JUNE 1997
(b)
(d)
gray levels of the rotated square and the background. This object was
therefore partly distorted. A lower threshold would, however, result in
a larger number of false edges and, thereby, poorer noise suppression.
Nonlinear VWME edge detection was performed using a window
of size 5 2 5. For every reconstruction stage, the threshold was set
to TVWME = 0:1, which was high enough to reject most of the detail
information in homogeneous regions [see Fig. 6(e)]. The choice of
threshold, however, did not seem to be crucial for the quality of the
enhanced image.
For comparison with another edge-preserving smoothing technique,
the simulated speckle image was processed by a 5 2 5-pixel Nagao
filter. The resulting image is displayed in Fig. 6(f). Visual exami-
nation of the images in Fig. 6 shows that, for a speckle image, the
present multiscale method performs edge preserving smoothing more
efficiently than the Nagao filter.
The performance measures of (3), (4), and (6) were evaluated for
images enhanced by the described multiscale method. The highest
performance was achieved using the RoA edge detector. Comparison
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 6, NO. 6, JUNE 1997
TABLE I
QUANTITATIVE RESULTS FROM SIMULATION EXAMPLE: QUALITY
MEASURES  AND  (IN PERCENT) AND SNRout (IN dB)
of the present method with some other techniques in terms of
SNRout ,  and  is given in Table I. All results concern five-stage
processing. However, similar performances were achieved using four
or six stages. The motive for limiting the number of stages is due
to scale limitations. The resolution imposes a lower limit to the
object size that can be represented. Moreover, the finite support of
the images makes boundary effects more compromising at a coarse
resolution. At scales larger than that of the innermost stage, no
highpass information—desired or undesired—is suppressed. If too
many stages are used, an edge may be missed at a coarse scale and
thereby at each finer scale.
In the enhanced images, a high gray-level variance remained at the
boundaries of objects, where no detail information was suppressed. In
order to further improve the performance of the method, postprocess-
ing can be applied to the output from the final reconstruction stage. In
our case, this was carried out by means of oriented smoothing, where
the average gradient in a 3 2 3-pixel window first was computed. If
a significant direction was at hand, the new pixel was determined by
smoothing in an approximately perpendicular direction. Otherwise,
nonoriented smoothing was applied. Improved results in terms of
SNRout ,  and  was acquired by oriented smoothing, as can be
observed in Table I.
IV. APPLICATION TO REAL IMAGES
A. Echographic Phantom Image
In the first example, we used an echographic image of a phantom
from Nuclear Associates (model 84-317). Fig. 7(a) shows a map of
the cross section, 96 mm 2 65 mm, in which the measurement
was made. The large bright “discs” represent “high scatter” regions
with diameters 8 mm and 12 mm, respectively, while the three dark
“discs” indicate “low scatter” regions with diameters 2, 4, and 6
mm, respectively. Besides, the phantom contains a number of fine
reflecting targets for calibration purposes. The rectangular region
was reproduced by scanning a 2.9 MHz ultrasonic beam through 108
parallel lines and sampling each envelope-detected echo at 440 points.
In order to give nearly square pixels, interpolation was performed in
the lateral direction. The acquired image is shown in Fig. 7(b).
The echogram was processed using the present multiscale method.
The same parameters and number of stages as in Section III were
used. The resulting images from using the three different approaches
to edge detection are shown in Fig. 7(c)–(e). It can be observed
895
that the image is smoothed except near the edges of objects. The
background, as well as the area inside the objects, becomes more
homogeneous without being significantly blurred at the edges.
B. Echocardiographic Image
As a second example, the multiscale method was tested on an
ultrasonic image of the heart. Transesophageal scanning was thereby
used for acquiring a short-axis cross section of the left ventricle.
The received echo data were scan converted onto a Cartesian grid
and displayed as a fan-shaped image. The ventricular wall causes
echoes, which appear as bright spots in the echocardiogram. How-
ever, these regions have a grainy texture, and sometimes parts of
the tissue are almost invisible in the image. Furthermore, there is
speckle noise, which in this case can be considered undesirable.
An echocardiographic image is shown in Fig. 8(a). The resulting
enhanced images using the different methods for edge detection are
presented in Fig. 8(b)–(d). The parameters were the same as the ones
used for the phantom image. In all cases, the speckle patterns were
considerably suppressed. The sharpness of the heart wall boundary
was preserved in most parts.
V. CONCLUSIONS
A nonlinear multiscale method for image enhancement was pre-
sented. It worked as a space-varying, speckle-suppressing filter by
removing high-frequency components at each scale only where no
edges were detected. The results showed that the method was able
to bring out homogeneous areas of constant speckle level while the
edges were preserved.
In the multiscale scheme, we used three different approaches
to edge detection, each of which required some kind of threshold
selection. For the linear (LoG) approach, this was accomplished
automatically at each scale and the method worked satisfactorily on
the considered set of images. The RoA method gave the highest
performance among the three edge detectors, but required a trade-off
between low frequency of false edges and high contrast discrim-
ination ability. The VWME method involved essentially the same
compromise, but could handle smaller image contrasts than the RoA
approach.
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