Finds and manages “edges” detected or placed on its ancestor McLineProfiles sampled line profiles or on a supplied profile.

The McProfileEdges object exposes a large set of properties and methods that allow automatic and manual placement of points-of-interest (i.e., “edges”) along a luminance profile derived from its ancestor McLineProfiles or supplied by the caller. These points-of-interest may be rising or falling edges, peaks or valley's, a match to an arbitray luminance pattern or just some specified position on the profile. Once “edges” are found or placed, McProfileEdges exposes an McLines object that has tic-marks and labels to show where they are.

The McProfileEdges operator is exposed as McLines.Profiles.ProfileEdges and as McRegions.Profiles.ProfileEdges. It can also (and often will) be created independently using McProfileEdges.Duplicate or McEngine.CreateOperator. The McProfileEdges.Duplicate method automatically creates a new object with the same parent, while you must supply the parent operator, if any, when using McEngine.CreateOperator. In any case, each instance must have a McProfileEdges object as an ancestor.

Muliple instances of the McProfileEdges operator can be created with the same parent McLineProfiles to find different points-of-interest along the same lines. For example, one instance might find rising edges and another instance falling edges, so that taking the differences between the placement of these edges would give the thickness of bright sections traversed by the ancestor McLines.

As described above, McProfileEdges operators are usually descendents of a McLineProfiles operator, which is a descendent of a McLines or a McRegions operator, which in turn are descendents of a McImage. McProfileEdges is used in this way to detect luminance patterns along lines or region boundaries (as captured by the McLineProfiles operator).

However, it is also legal to create global instances of McProfileEdges operators (i.e., ones where the CreateOperator call has Nothing for the Parent parameter). When used this way, you must supply the raw “luminance” profiles upon which the edges will be detected. That is the role of the RawProfiles property. For global McProfileEdges only, after assigning one or more arrays of values to RawProfiles, you may use FindEdges to detect patterns of value variation (e.g., peaks or valleys) using all of the tools supplied by McProfileEdges.