First- and Second-Order Full-Differential in Edge Analysis of Images

Two concepts of first- and second-order differential of images are presented to deal with the changes of pixels. These are the basic ideas in mathematics. We propose and reformulate them with a uniform definition framework. Based on our observation and analysis with the difference, we propose an algorithm to detect the edge from image. Experiments on Corel5K and PASCAL VOC 2007 are done to show the difference between the first order and the second order. After comparison with Canny operator and the proposed first-order differential, the main result is that the second-order differential has the better performance in analysis of changes of the context of images with good selection of control parameter.