How to Detect and Highlight Edges in an Image

Edge detection refers to the process of detecting and highlighting objects with edges in an image by detecting gaps in the image’s brightness. This has limitless practical and aesthetic applications — and you can easily incorporate this operation as a service in your app using our Edge Highlighting & Detection API. When configuring this API, you just need to provide a radius (in pixels) for the edge detection operation along with your input image file path, and you’re good to go. This API can be used for free with a free-tier Cloudmersive API key (which you can get by registering a free account on our website), and you can structure your API call easily using the ready-to-run Java code examples provided below in this article.

Without further ado, I’ll demonstrate how we can install the API client & call the API. First things first: let’s add a reference to the repository in pom.xml:

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>jitpack.io</id>
        <url>https://jitpack.io</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

Next let’s add a reference to the pom.xml dependency:

<dependencies>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.Cloudmersive</groupId>
    <artifactId>Cloudmersive.APIClient.Java</artifactId>
    <version>v4.25</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>

Now let’s add the imports to the top of our file:

// Import classes:
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.ApiClient;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.ApiException;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.Configuration;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.auth.*;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.FilterApi;

And finally let’s call the function, first adding our API key & then configuring our parameters where shown by the code comments:

ApiClient defaultClient = Configuration.getDefaultApiClient();
// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
ApiKeyAuth Apikey = (ApiKeyAuth) defaultClient.getAuthentication("Apikey");
Apikey.setApiKey("YOUR API KEY");
// Uncomment the following line to set a prefix for the API key, e.g. "Token" (defaults to null)
//Apikey.setApiKeyPrefix("Token");
FilterApi apiInstance = new FilterApi();
Integer radius = 56; // Integer | Radius in pixels of the edge detection operation; a larger radius will produce a greater effect
File imageFile = new File("/path/to/inputfile"); // File | Image file to perform the operation on.  Common file formats such as PNG, JPEG are supported.
try {
    byte[] result = apiInstance.filterEdgeDetect(radius, imageFile);
    System.out.println(result);
} catch (ApiException e) {
    System.err.println("Exception when calling FilterApi#filterEdgeDetect");
    e.printStackTrace();
}

After that, you’re all done — no more code required. Easy as pie!