An Overview of Contour Detection Approaches

Object contour plays an important role in fields such as semantic segmentation and image classification. However, the extraction of contour is a difficult task, especially when the contour is incomplete or unclosed. In this paper, the existing contour detection approaches are reviewed and roughly divided into three categories: pixel-based, edge-based, and region-based. In addition, since the traditional contour detection approaches have achieved a high degree of sophistication, the deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have good performance in image recognition, therefore, the DCNNs based contour detection approaches are also covered in this paper. Moreover, the future development of contour detection is analyzed and predicted.