The Sobel Operator

Sir, we could use the Sobel operator to accomplish that! And then there was silence in the room. One of the great scientists was at risk of losing his credibility by admitting that he had never heard of the Sobel operator and hence he nodded somewhat sheepishly in agreement. I wouldn't be surprised a bit, if he had rushed to the library as soon as we left the room a few minutes later to find out what I had uttered a few minutes ago was indeed the right solution. This person was our so called senior supervisor during our final year engineering project on imaging. I recently ran into the Sobel operator not too long back while post processing some of the snaps in GIMP, and that's when I remembered this incident. I am pretty sure, the supervisor had some sleepless nights after that.

Just to give you guys a brief insight into the Sobel operator here, it is a matrix that can detect edges while processing a 2D image. I wish we had more time on our hands doing the project as the scope of pre and post image processing is really vast. Imaging is a very interesting field and even though I am currently no where near that stream, it was one of the first things of interest while leaping in to the professional world of software engineering.