Edges are useful features for structural image analysis, but the output of standard edge detectors must be thresholded to remove the many spurious edges. This paper describes experiments with both new and old techniques for: 1) automatically determining appropriate edge threshold values, and 2) determining edge saliency (as alternatives to gradient magnitude). keywords: edge threshold saliency assessment which was manually chosen. In contrast, we wish to assign all edge pixels at the finest scale a lifetime value, and their relative values should be insensitive to the coarsest scale. Therefore, when tracking coarse-to-fine we also track edges that are created at all intermediate scales. A slight modification can be made to these two approaches to combine edge lifetime and gradient magnitude. Rather than simply counting the number of scales an edge exists over, the gradient magnitudes at each scale are summed during the tracking process. An alternative method for combining lifetime and gradient magnitude suggested by Griffin et al. (Griffin, Colchester, Robinson, and Hawkes 1992) is the product of the gradient magnitude ∇I with the angle of the isoluminance curve through scale space arctan ∇I ∇ 2 I. However, apart from an initial sharpening effect we have found that this measure is essentially the same as the unmodified gradient after non-maximal suppression. This is not unexpected since ∇ 2 I equals zero close to edges (e.g. Marr and Hildreth's zero-crossing edge detector), and so arctan ∇I ∇ 2 I simply evaluates to Π 2. 2.2 Wiggliness The expectation is that noisy edges are less likely to be locally straight or smooth than significant edges (Rogowitz and Voss 1990). There are several possibilities for measuring edge wiggliness. We have experimented with kregularity (Vasselle and Giraudon 1994) which is defined at each point p i on the curve as: r s,k (i) = p i+ks − p i k j=1 p i+js − p i+(j−1)s and averaged over the curve, and the circular variance of orientation as defined in Gregson (Gregson 1993) or Mardia (Mardia 1972). Other possibilities include orientation coherence (Larré and Montseny 1994), complexity (Dubuc and Zucker 1994), and difference in curvature (Rosin and West 1995). A drawback with such approaches is that they generally require some parameters specifying the scale of analysis, e.g. s and k for k-regularity, and the window size for orientation dispersion.