General method for edge detection based on the shear transform

A method for detecting edges is proposed in this study. First, it combines a traditional edge detection operator with the shear transform utilising the fact that the shear filters provide a more favourable treatment of directions, the shear transform makes the directional edges easy to detect by traditional operators; then the edge information in different directions are fused to complement each other, and a correspondence threshold, which is acquired according to receiver operating characteristic curves, is used to refine the edges; finally, the optimal result is obtained. Moreover, the authors can consider the proposed method as a general method since it could be applicable to other edge detection operators. The experimental results have indicated that our method has advantage over the traditional ones of the effectiveness of edge detection and the ability of noise rejection.