Hough transform霍夫变换

Theory[edit]

In automated analysis of digital images, a subproblem often arises of detecting simple shapes, such as straight lines, circles or ellipses. In many cases an edge detector can be used as a pre-processing stage to obtain image points or image pixels that are on the desired curve in the image space. Due to imperfections in either the image data or the edge detector, however, there may be missing points or pixels on the desired curves as well as spatial deviations between the ideal line/circle/ellipse and the noisy edge points as they are obtained from the edge detector. For these reasons, it is often non-trivial to group the extracted edge features to an appropriate set of lines, circles or ellipses. The purpose of the Hough transform is to address this problem by making it possible to perform groupings of edge points into object candidates by performing an explicit voting procedure over a set of parameterized image objects (Shapiro and Stockman, 304).

The simplest case of Hough transform is the linear transform for detecting straight lines. In the image space, the straight line can be described as y = mx + b where the parameter m is the slope of the line, and b is the intercept (y-intercept). This is called the slope-intercept model of a straight line. In the Hough transform, a main idea is to consider the characteristics of the straight line not as discrete image points (x₁, y₁), (x₂, y₂), etc., but instead, in terms of its parameters according to the slope-intercept model, i.e., the slope parameter m and the intercept parameter b. In general, the straight line y = mx + b can be represented as a point (b, m) in the parameter space. However, vertical lines pose a problem. They are more naturally described as x = a and would give rise to unbounded values of the slope parameter m. Thus, for computational reasons, Duda and Hart proposed the use of a different pair of parameters, denoted  and  (theta), for the lines in the Hough transform. These two values, taken in conjunction, define a