Multi-feature edge detection with scale-rate as the measurement of local image complexity

The scale-rate is proposed as the measurement of local image complexity. It is inspired by the estimation of the box-counting dimension. The definition of scale-rate is based on the idea that the complexity of an object can be reflected by the rate of the change of the object's measurement with respect to the observing scale. The scale-rate is experimentally proved to be an important feature of image edge areas. Multi-feature edge detection is achieved with the scale-rate and image intensity discontinuity. Experimental results show that the proposed multi-feature method improves the performance of edge detection.