Edge detection plays an important role in computer vision tasks, and h
as received considerable attention in image processing literature. To
detect edges correctly and precisely, contextual information is needed
. How to use contextual information is a key issue. In this paper, we
introduce an edge detection method that will use edge contextual infor
mation of the whole image efficiency. This new method tries to employ
contextual information within a certain distance from the focus pixel
at a time. This distance keeps increasing recursively until the edge f
eature of a pixel is uniquely defined. In this manner, we can minimize
the need for contextual information. Experimental results are present
ed to characterize the performance of our new method in terms of bette
r connectedness of edges and less distortion, and in terms of computat
ional efficiency. A detailed comparison of our method with the context
free zero-crossing edge operator that uses optimal exponential filter
is discussed in this paper.