The nonsymmetry and antipacking pattern representation model （NAM）, inspired by the concept of the packing problem, uses a set of subpatterns to represent an original pattern. The NAM is a promising method for image representation because of its ability to focus on the interesting subsets of an image. In this paper, we develop a new method for gray-scale image representation based on NAM, called NAM-structured plane decomposition （NAMPD）, in which each subpattern is associated with a rectangular region in the image. The luminance function of pixels in this region is approximated by an oblique plane model. Then, we propose a new and fast edge detection algorithm based on NAMPD. The theoretical analyses and experimental results presented in this paper show that the edge detection algorithm using NAMPD performs faster than the classical ones because it permits the execution of operations on subpatterns instead of pixels.
