Abstract
In this paper we explore approaches to accelerating segmentation and edge detection algorithms based on the \emph{gPb} framework. The paper characterizes the performance of a simple but effective edge detection scheme which can be computed rapidly and offers performance that is competitive with the pB detector. The paper also describes an approach for computing a reduced order normalized cut that captures the essential features of the original problem but can be computed in less than half a second on a standard computing platform.