This paper presents a broadband, large-aperture metasurface edge encoder for incoherent infrared radiation. The system combines a 24-mm aperture metasurface with a refractive lens to enable optical edge detection of real-world scenes. An inverse design approach is used to optimize the metasurface for Laplacian-based edge detection across the 7.5- to 13.5-μm LWIR imaging band, allowing for integration with uncooled microbolometer-based LWIR imagers. A polarization multiplexed approach leveraging a birefringent metasurface is also demonstrated as a single-aperture implementation. The system is used for LWIR electro-optical edge detection of thermal emission from real-world scenes, demonstrating the viability of this approach for implementation as an accelerated front-end for practical computer vision systems. The system works by shaping the effective PSF into a derivative kernel, such as the Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) kernel. Incoherent imaging systems are linear with respect to light intensity, which constrains the incoherent PSF to only positive values. Bipolar edge detection kernels can be synthesized by an optoelectronic system, however, by separating the desired kernel into its constituent positive and negative components. The system is demonstrated first in a two-aperture approach, followed by extension into a single-aperture architecture using polarization multiplexing. In both cases, combination with a refractive optic allows us to overcome the typical bandwidth limitations associated with large aperture metalenses. In addition, inverse design is used to optimize performance for broadband LWIR emission while also preserving the SNR in the synthesized edge images. The metasurface design involves an inverse design process to optimize the negative component of the PSF. The positive component was taken as the PSF from the 24-mm F/1 refractive lens of an off-the-shelf FLIR Boson 640, and the negative component is a superposition of the same refractive lens with an optimized metasurface. The loss function includes three terms: a sum of squared errors between the simulated and target edge images, an inverse of the relative signal strength in the edge image, and a penalty on the spatial gradient of the meta-atom width to smooth the metasurface phase profile, which improves convergence speed and broadband performance. The experimental characterization shows that the inversely designed metasurface has a higher SNR and can detect edges in lower contrast scenes. The edge detection imaging system was characterized by imaging a blackbody Siemens star with a temperature of 315 K. The results show that the optimized metasurface delivers a higher SNR and can detect edges in lower contrast scenes. The edge detection for the optimized metasurface is also invariant to edge orientation, unlike the spiral phase, which detects some edge orientations more strongly due to the asymmetry of the spiral phase PSF under broadband illumination. The system is demonstrated for real-worldThis paper presents a broadband, large-aperture metasurface edge encoder for incoherent infrared radiation. The system combines a 24-mm aperture metasurface with a refractive lens to enable optical edge detection of real-world scenes. An inverse design approach is used to optimize the metasurface for Laplacian-based edge detection across the 7.5- to 13.5-μm LWIR imaging band, allowing for integration with uncooled microbolometer-based LWIR imagers. A polarization multiplexed approach leveraging a birefringent metasurface is also demonstrated as a single-aperture implementation. The system is used for LWIR electro-optical edge detection of thermal emission from real-world scenes, demonstrating the viability of this approach for implementation as an accelerated front-end for practical computer vision systems. The system works by shaping the effective PSF into a derivative kernel, such as the Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) kernel. Incoherent imaging systems are linear with respect to light intensity, which constrains the incoherent PSF to only positive values. Bipolar edge detection kernels can be synthesized by an optoelectronic system, however, by separating the desired kernel into its constituent positive and negative components. The system is demonstrated first in a two-aperture approach, followed by extension into a single-aperture architecture using polarization multiplexing. In both cases, combination with a refractive optic allows us to overcome the typical bandwidth limitations associated with large aperture metalenses. In addition, inverse design is used to optimize performance for broadband LWIR emission while also preserving the SNR in the synthesized edge images. The metasurface design involves an inverse design process to optimize the negative component of the PSF. The positive component was taken as the PSF from the 24-mm F/1 refractive lens of an off-the-shelf FLIR Boson 640, and the negative component is a superposition of the same refractive lens with an optimized metasurface. The loss function includes three terms: a sum of squared errors between the simulated and target edge images, an inverse of the relative signal strength in the edge image, and a penalty on the spatial gradient of the meta-atom width to smooth the metasurface phase profile, which improves convergence speed and broadband performance. The experimental characterization shows that the inversely designed metasurface has a higher SNR and can detect edges in lower contrast scenes. The edge detection imaging system was characterized by imaging a blackbody Siemens star with a temperature of 315 K. The results show that the optimized metasurface delivers a higher SNR and can detect edges in lower contrast scenes. The edge detection for the optimized metasurface is also invariant to edge orientation, unlike the spiral phase, which detects some edge orientations more strongly due to the asymmetry of the spiral phase PSF under broadband illumination. The system is demonstrated for real-world