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The Hough transform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2011

MAARTEN FOKKINGA*
Affiliation:
Department EEMCS, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands (e-mail: m.m.fokkinga@utwente.nl)
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Suppose you are given a number of points in a plane and want to have those lines that each contain a large number of the given points. The Hough transform is a computerized procedure for that task. It was invented by Paul Hough (1962), originally to find the trajectories of subatomic particles in a bubble chamber, and it has even been patented. Nowadays, adaptations of the Hough transform are used, among others, for identification of transformed instances of a predefined figure, instead of just a line, in a digital picture. There are plenty of explanations on the Internet (use search key “Hough transform” and “generalized Hough transform”), some with nice applets to demonstrate the working (add search key “applet” or “demo”). Recently, Hart (2009) has looked back at the invention. We show how the original procedure could have been derived.

Type
Functional Pearls
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

References

Hart, P. E. (2009). How the Hough transform was invented [DSP History], Signal Process. Mag. IEEE, 26 (6): 1822.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hough, P. V. C. (December 8, 2010). Method and means for recognizing complex patterns [online]. US Patent 3,069,654. Available at: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3069654.pdf. Interesting excerpts appear in (Hart, 2009).Google Scholar
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