Quantitative error measures for edge detection

How to measure the performance of an edge detection method is an open problem. Many performance measures have been presented in the literature. However, there seems to be no agreement on the best option, and there exist no practical studies of the features of some of the most recent measures. In this work we make a comprehensive overview of the different proposals, followed by a practical comparison of the most representative measures on synthetic as well as natural edge images.

► Analysing different aspects of the evaluation of the quality of an edge image. ► Proposing a hierarchical structure to organize the error measures in the literature. ► Reviewing in detail the error measures in the literature. ► Performing two experiments to illustrate the behaviour of such error measures.