Image Processing – Implementing Sobel Filter

It’s pretty easy, you just need to convolve your image with a Sobel filter. A Sobel filter has two kernels, x-direction kernel and y-direction kernel. The x-direction kernel detects horizontal edges, and y-direction kernels detects vertical edges.

x-direction kernel (the size is 3×3)

float kernelx[3][3] = {{-1, 0, 1}, 
                       {-2, 0, 2}, 
                       {-1, 0, 1}};

y-direction kernel

float kernely[3][3] = {{-1, -2, -1}, 
                        {0,  0,  0}, 
                        {1,  2,  1}};

To calculate the convolution at pixel (x,y), define a window of size equal to the kernel size (source code to calculate magnitude in x and magnitude in y are identical):

double magX = 0.0; // this is your magnitude

for(int a = 0; a < 3; a++)
{
    for(int b = 0; b < 3; b++)
    {            
        int xn = x + a - 1;
        int yn = y + b - 1;

        int index = xn + yn * width;
        magX += image[index] * kernelx[a][b];
    }
 }

Note that the input is a grayscale image and it can be represented as 1D array of double (This is just a trick, since a pixel value in coordinate (x,y) can be accessed with index = [x + y * width] )

To calculate magnitude in pixel (x,y) given magX and magY :

mag = sqrt( magX^2 + magY^2 )