Bilateral edge detection on a virtual hexagonal structure

Edge detection plays an important role in image processing area. This paper presents an edge detection method based on bilateral filtering which achieves better performance than single Gaussian filtering. In this form of filtering, both spatial closeness and intensity similarity of pixels are considered in order to preserve important visual cues provided by edges and reduce the sharpness of transitions in intensity values as well. In addition, the edge detection method proposed in this paper is achieved on sampled images represented on a newly developed virtual hexagonal structure. Due to the compact and circular nature of the hexagonal lattice, a better quality edge map is obtained on the hexagonal structure than common edge detection on square structure. Experimental results using proposed methods exhibit encouraging performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006