Chapter 7
Matching Linear Structure: the Hough Transform

Finding simple shapes, such as lines and circles, in images may look like a simple task but computational issues coupled with noise and occlusions require some not so naive solutions. In spite of the apparent diversity of lines and areas, it turns out that common approaches to the detection of linear structures can be seen as a an efficient implementation of matched filters. The chapter describes how to compute salient image discontinuities and how simple shapes embedded in the resulting map can be located with the Radon/Hough transform.

keywords: edge detection, Radon transform, Hough transform, generalized Hough transform, fixed-band estimator.