To solve the problem that the location of broken pipes in a factory cannot be accurately determined by machine vision,a pipeline edge detection method based on improved Canny operator with adaptive threshold segmentation is proposed.The method processes the acquired images in terms of filtering method,gradient direction and threshold segmentation.Firstly,sampling-adaptive median filtering+bilateral filtering is used instead of Gaussian filtering in the traditional Canny operator to reduce the loss of image edge information and remove the noise in the image.Then,the gradient amplitude is calculated to detect the edge information in different directions.Finally,to avoid the ineffective manual selection of thresholds,the OTSU threshold segmentation algorithm is used for adaptive selection of thresholds.Experiments show that the method improves the image signal-to-noise ratio by 28.22%,the number of edge points by 39.97%,the number of four-connection channels by 11.52% and the number of eight-connection channels by 5.92% compared to the conventional Canny operator.The extracted features are complete and have good continuity, enabling effective detection of breakage in pipeline images.