Edge detection algorithm based on ICA-domain shrinkage in noisy images

We propose a robust edge detection method based on ICA-domain shrinkage (independent component analysis). It is known that most basis functions extracted from natural images by ICA are sparse and similar to localized and oriented receptive fields, and in the proposed edge detection method, a target image is first transformed by ICA basis functions and then the edges are detected or reconstructed with sparse components. Furthermore, by applying a shrinkage algorithm to filter out the components of noise in ICA-domain, we can readily obtain the sparse components of the original image, resulting in a kind of robust edge detection even for a noisy image with a very low SN ratio. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated by experiments with some natural images.