Having learned about and also implemented the Sobel edge detector in the previous section, we now turn our attention to yet another edge detection algorithm, namely the Canny edge detector. It's named after its inventor John F. Canny who came up with the algorithm in 1986. The algorithm is much more involved than the Sobel edge detector and is considered to be superior to the latter.
The basic guiding principles powering the Canny detector remain the same. This means that we will still use the gradient values as indicators of whether the pixel belongs to a potential edge region or not. However, there are certain additional steps that are performed by the detector to improve the quality of detected edges. We provide a brief explanation of the same. Note that we won't be getting into the intricate mathematical details behind Canny. Rather, we would only be sharing the intuitions that motivate the additional steps that the algorithm performs. In addition to improving...