A robust approach for detecting the edges of outdoor wire fences

Abstract

Detection of outdoor wire fences in images is an important and preliminary step in an automated image analysis algorithm for the detection of wire-fence integrity. The challenge is that not only are the wires of the fences in general very thin, a daytime variation in illumination makes the task even more difficult as this may cause non-uniform illumination across the fences. We address the problem of wire-fence detection by an image processing algorithm that combines the Sobel edge operator with an adaptive thresholding technique to generate a binary image. Simulation results demonstrate that the edges of wire fences can be detected accurately under different illumination conditions.