Incremental Hough Transform: an Improvement Algorithm for Digital Devices

Hough transform is one of the most common methods for detecting shapes (lines, circles, etc.) in binary or edge images. Its advantage is the ability to detect discontinuous patterns in noisy images, but it requires a large amount of computing power. This paper presents a novel algorithm for computing the Incremental Hough Transform (IHT) that was developed for digital devices implementation. This algorithm does not require any Look Up Table (LUT) and trigonometric calculations at run time. The number of the ρ values generated in parallel is defined at the beginning of this algorithm. This algorithm leads to a significant reduction of the Hough transform (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.