A Novel Image Edge Detection Method Based on the Asymmetric STDP Mechanism of the Visual Path

The detection of image edges plays an important role for image processing. In view of the fact that these existing methods cannot effectively detect the edge of the image when facing the image with rich details. This paper proposes a novel method of asymmetric spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) image edge detection based on the visual physiological mechanism. In the proposed method, the original image is preprocessed by the Gabor filter to simulate the visual physiological orientation characteristics to obtain the image information in different directions, and the orientation feature fusion is used to reconstruct the primary edge feature information of the image. Then, based on the mechanism of the visual nervous system, a neuron network composed of dynamic synapses based on the asymmetric STDP mechanism is constructed to further process it to obtain impulse response images. In order to eliminate disturbance of the neuron’s system noise on the impulse response image, the impulse response image is filtered by a Gaussian filter. Then, the lateral inhibition between neurons is applied to refine the filtered image edges. Finally, the result is normalized, and the final edge of the experimental image is obtained. Experimental results based on the colony image data set collected in the laboratory indicate that the proposed method achieved better performance than these state-of-the-art methods; meanwhile, the AUC value remains above 0.6.