Population coding has become an essential paradigm in cognitive neuroscience over the past decade and is increasingly studied within the neural network community [10, 9, 7] In this paper we investigate the use of population vector decoding [3] for local edge orientation estimation from a discrete set of Gabor filters. Vectorial combination of the broadly tuned filter outputs yields a resultant population vector, which gives a precise and robust estimate of the local contour orientation. We present results on the accuracy and robustness of orientation measurement.