Incremental Hough transform: an improved algorithm for digital device implementation

Abstract

Hough Transform (HT) is one of the most common methods for detecting shapes (lines, circles, etc.) in binary or edge images. Its advantage is its ability to detect discontinuous patterns in noisy images, but it requires a large amount of computing power. This paper presents a fast and enhanced version for computing the Incremental HT that was developed for digital device implementation. This algorithm does not require any Look Up Table or trigonometric calculations at run time. A number of the $\rho$ values generated in parallel is defined at the beginning of this algorithm. This algorithm leads to a significant reduction of the HT computation time and can be therefore used in real-time applications. This paper also provides some results obtained by this algorithm on several images.