Blurry edge detection

Question

I have little background knowledge of image processing and recognition. I am trying to detect principal edges/grayscale transitions on a grayscale image such as a portrait. The problem is that on some parts, the edge is blurred (because of focus). I am using Canny edge detector with multiple thresholds, but I can never detect those edges (chin, clothes, ears, side of the face, ...)

Original image: This is the result I am getting: beard, sharp edges This is what features I'm interested in: transitions between the main gray areas

Is edge detection the right tool for this? Thanks!

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UPDATE: Using Deriche filtering and halving the size of the image before edge detection (with apertureSize=7), I got it working pretty close to what I want.

Answer 1

Using canny-deriche filter you can find :

Full code is here