# A new baseline for edge detection: Make Encoder-Decoder great again

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14976 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14976/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [Richer Convolutional Features for Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02103/) (2016)
- [MetaFormer Baselines for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13452/) (2022)
- [Dense Extreme Inception Network: Towards a Robust CNN Model for Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01955/) (2019)
- [Learning to predict crisp boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10097/) (2018)
- [The Edge of Depth: Explicit Constraints between Segmentation and Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00171/) (2020)
- [Fast Edge Detection Using Structured Forests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.5549/) (2014)
- [DeepEdge: A Multi-Scale Bifurcated Deep Network for Top-Down Contour Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1123/) (2014)
- [Dense Extreme Inception Network for Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02250/) (2021)
- [ET-Net: A Generic Edge-aTtention Guidance Network for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10936/) (2019)
- [Pushing the Boundaries of Boundary Detection using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07386/) (2015)
- [DiffusionEdge: Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Crisp Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02032/) (2024)
- [Unmixing Convolutional Features for Crisp Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09808/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06541/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Structured Multi-Scale Features using Attention-Gated CRFs for Contour Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00524/) (2018)
- [Oriented Edge Forests for Boundary Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4181/) (2014)
- [The Treasure Beneath Multiple Annotations: An Uncertainty-aware Edge Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11828/) (2023)
- [Boundary-aware Context Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00966/) (2020)
- [Practical Edge Detection via Robust Collaborative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14084/) (2023)
- [FINED: Fast Inference Network for Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08392/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RealOOB: A Definition-Consistent Real-World Oriented Occlusion Boundary Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30820/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The performance of deep learning based edge detector has far exceeded that of humans, but the huge computational cost and complex training strategy hinder its further development and application. In this paper, we eliminate these complexities with a vanilla encoder-decoder based detector. Firstly, we design a bilateral encoder to decouple the extraction process of location features and semantic features. Since the location branch no longer provides cues for the semantic branch, the richness of features can be further compressed, which is the key to make our model more compact. We propose a cascaded feature fusion decoder, where the location features are progressively refined by semantic features. The refined location features are the only basis for generating the edge map. The coarse original location features and semantic features are avoided from direct contact with the final result. So the noise in the location features and the location error in the semantic features can be suppressed in the generated edge map. The proposed New Baseline for Edge Detection (NBED) achieves superior performance consistently across multiple edge detection benchmarks, even compared with those methods with huge computational cost and complex training strategy. The ODS of NBED on BSDS500 is 0.838, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our study shows that what really matters in the current edge detection is high-quality features, and we can make the encoder-decoder based detector great again even without complex training strategies and huge computational cost. The code is available at https://github.com/Li-yachuan/NBED.