Efficient Image Contour Detection using Edge Prior

An effective and efficient image contour detector is highly desired
due to its wide applications in computer vision and multimedia
retrieval. However, the state-of-the-art image contour
detection algorithms are very computationally intensive, and
thus impractical for web-scale applications. In this work, we
study the relationship between edge detection and contour detection,
based on which an edge-based image contour detection
algorithm is proposed. This algorithm fully makes use
of cheap edge information for efficiency purpose. The experiments
on benchmark data sets show that, the proposed contour
detector works much faster than existing state-of-the-art
algorithms while maintaining high accuracy, and thus suitable
for large-scale applications.