Comparison of edge detection algorithms using a structure from motion task

This paper presents an evaluation of edge detector performance. We use the task of structure from motion (SFM) as a "black box" through which to evalu ate the performance of edge detection algorithms. Edge detector goodness is measured by how accurately the SFM could recover the known structure and m otion from the edge detection of the image sequences. We use a variety of r eal image sequences with ground truth to evaluate eight different edge dete ctors from the literature. Our results suggest that ratings of edge detecto r performance based on pixel-level metrics and on the SFM are well correlat ed and that detectors such as the Canny detector and Heitger detector offer the best performance.