Accelerating the Hough Transform with CUDA on Graphics Processing Units

Circle detection has been widely applied in image processing applications. Hough transform, the most popular method of shape detection, normally takes a long time to achieve reasonable results, especially for large images. Such performance makes it almost impossible to conduct real-time image processing with sequential algorithms on community computers. Recently, NVIDIA developed CUDA programming paradigm to explore the tremendous computational power for operations on vectors, matrices and highdimensional matrices. In this paper, two Hough transform algorithms are designed to run on both CPU and GPU computing platforms. Experimental results indicate that the better Hough transform on GPUs can achieve up to 400 times speedup over the version on CPU. With other efficient image scaling algorithms, real-time circle extraction can be achieved with GPU support.