What is Image Gradient

Image segmentation has been an active topic of research for many years. Edges characterize boundaries, and therefore, detection of edges is a problem of fundamental importance in image processing. Edge detection in images significantly reduces the amount of data and filters out useless information while preserving the important structural properties in an image. Edges carry significant information about the image structure and shape, which is useful in various applications related with computer vision. In many applications, the edge detection is used as a pre-processing step. Edge detection is highly beneficial in automated cell counting, structural analysis of the image, automated object detection, shape analysis, optical character recognition, etc. Different filters are developed to find the gradients and detect edges. In this chapter, a new filter (kernel) is proposed, and the compass operator is applied on it to detect edges more efficiently. The results are compared with some of the previously proposed filters both qualitatively and quantitatively.