considered task dependent. For object recognition,
for example, some operators may perform better than
others despite similar performance on synthetic im-
ages. The proposed surround interaction mechanisms
is aimed at a better detection of objects contours in
natural scenes.
We tested the performance of the proposed scheme
on 40 natural images from a database designed to
evaluate the performance of contour detection (dat,
2003). For each test image, an associated desired out-
put binary contour map that was drawn by human is
given. It should be noted that the ground truth data in-
cludes more than one type of pixels: (i) pixels which
are parts of a contour of an object (ii) pixels which
are part of a boundary between two (textured) regions.
Our proposed scheme on the other hand, is designed
to extract only the first type of contour pixels.
4.2 Performance Measure
In order to have a quantitative comparison between
the contour detector proposed in (Grigorescu et al.,
2003) we use the performance measure introduced in
the same. Let f
p
and f
n
are number of false positive
and false negative pixels detected in the final contour
map, respectively. The performance measure is de-
fined as follows:
P =
t
p
t
p
+ f
p
+ f
n
(1)
where, t
p
is the number of correctly detected con-
tour pixels (True positive). The performance measure
P is a scalar taking values in the interval [0, 1].If
the desired output pixels are correctly detected and no
background pixels are falsely detected as contour pix-
els, then P =1. For all other cases, P takes values
smaller than one, being closer to zero as more con-
tour pixels are falsely detected and/or missed by the
operator.
For computing the performance measure, we must
determine which true positives are correctly detected,
and which detection is false. The binary contour map
in the ground truth data can be used for this pur-
pose. Let us consider how to compute P of a out-
put contour image given a ground truth contour map.
One could simply correspond coincident contour pix-
els and declare all unmatched pixels either as false
positives or misses. However, this approach would
not tolerate any localization error and result in a poor
performance measure. For robustness, it is desirable
that the correspondence of output contour pixels to
ground truth tolerate localization errors since ground
truth data is not accurately localized. The approach
proposed in (Grigorescu et al., 2003) considers a con-
tour pixel as correctly detected if a corresponding
ground truth contour pixel is present in a 5×5 (empir-
ically find) square neighborhood (window) centered
Table 1: Performance of proposed scheme and reported
by Cosmin (Grigorescu et al., 2003) on 3 natural im-
ages(elephant, goat and hyena).
Image Method Performance
Goat (Grigorescu et al., 2003) 0.34
Proposed Scheme 0.51
Elephant (Grigorescu et al., 2003) 0.42
Proposed Scheme 0.61
Hyena (Grigorescu et al., 2003) 0.55
Proposed Scheme 0.76
at the respective pixel coordinate. A window based
approach leads to a less robust performance measure,
as different sizes of the window can be shown to af-
fect the performance value significantly, which is a
undesirable. A large window will boost the number
of true positive. However, an explicit correspondence
of the detected contour and ground truth contour pix-
els is the only way to robustly count the hits, misses
and false positives that we need to compute P .We
have used the algorithm presented in (Martin et al.,
2004) for the correspondence between output contour
map and a ground truth contour map. The algorithm
converts the corresponding problem into a minimum
cost bipartite assignment problem, where the weight
between a output contour pixel and ground truth con-
tour pixel is proportional to their relative distance in
the image plane. One can then declare all contour
pixels matched beyond some threshold to be non-hits.
The correspondence computation is detailed in (Mar-
tin et al., 2004).
4.3 Results
The proposed contour detection scheme was tested on
40 images from a database reported in (Grigorescu
et al., 2003). Of these, we present results on 3 im-
ages in Fig 5 for illustrative purposes. A qualita-
tive comparison between the results of our contour
detection scheme and the contour reported in (Grig-
orescu et al., 2003) can be made by observing the re-
sults in this figure. The Canny edge detector outputs
are also included for reference. The first and second
columns show the input images and the corresponding
ground truth images, respectively; the third column
shows the best results of the Canny edge detector; the
fourth column shows the results of the contour detec-
tion reported by (Grigorescu et al., 2003); and finally,
the fifth column shows the results of the proposed
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