An Edge Detection Method using a Fuzzy Ensemble Approach

Edge detection is one of the most important low level steps in image processing. In this work we propose a fuzzy ensemble based method for edge detection including a fuzzy c-means (FCM) approach to define the input membership functions of the fuzzy inference system (FIS). We tested the performance of the method using a public database with ground truth. Also, we compared our proposal with classical and other fuzzy based methods, using F-measure curves and the precision metric. We conducted experiments with different levels of salt & pepper noise to evaluate the performance of the edge detectors. The metrics illustrate the robustness of the choice of the threshold in the binarization step using this fuzzy ensemble method. In noisy conditions, the proposed method works better than other fuzzy approaches. Comparative results validated that our proposal overcomes traditional techniques. © 2017, Budapest Tech Polytechnical Institution. All rights reserved.