The asterisk operator. An edge detection operator addressing the problem of clean edges in bone X-ray images

Edge detection is a fundamental step in many machine vision or image processing applications and systems. The importance of edge detection increases as one seeks to increase the level of automation in the image processing system. The paper reports an edge detection operator which is fast in application to grey scale images and is sensitive to 'difficult' edges but not sensitive to artifacts such as scanner interlacing artifacts. The edge detection operator presented is simple but provides good detection of edges and clean and continuous edges across most of the image.