HOUGH TRANSFORM

Presentation by Sumit Tandon

Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Texas at Arlington

Course # EE6358 Computer Vision

Contents
 Introduction
 Advantages of Hough transform
 Hough Transform for Straight Line
Detection
 Hough Transform for Circle Detection
 Recap and list of parameters
 Generalized Hough Transform
 Improvisation of Hough Transform
 Examples
 References

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1. Introduction
 Performed after Edge Detection
 It is a technique to isolate the curves of a
given shape / shapes in a given image
 Classical Hough Transform can locate
regular curves like straight lines, circles,
parabolas, ellipses, etc.
 Requires that the curve be specified in some
parametric form
 Generalized Hough Transform can be used
where a simple analytic description of
feature is not possible
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2. Advantages of Hough Transform
 The Hough Transform is tolerant of
gaps in the edges
 It is relatively unaffected by noise
 It is also unaffected by occlusion in
the image

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3.1 Hough Transform for Straight
Line Detection
 A straight line can be represented as
 y = mx + c
 This representation fails in case of vertical lines
 A more useful representation in this case is

 Demo
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3.2 Hough Transform for Straight
Lines
 Advantages of Parameterization
 Values of ‘’ and ‘’ become bounded
 How to find intersection of the
parametric curves
 Use of accumulator arrays – concept of
‘Voting’
 To reduce the computational load use
Gradient information

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3.3 Computational Load
 Image size = 512 X 512
 Maximum value of   512 * 2 2
 With a resolution of 1o, maximum
value of   360
 Accumulator size = 512 * 2 2 * 360
 Use of direction of gradient reduces
the computational load by 1/360

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3.4 Hough Transform for Straight
Lines - Algorithm
 Quantize the Hough Transform space: identify the
maximum and minimum values of  and 
 Generate an accumulator array A(, ); set all values
to zero
 For all edge points (xi, yi) in the image
 Use gradient direction for 
 Compute  from the equation
 Increment A(, ) by one
 For all cells in A(, )
 Search for the maximum value of A(, )
 Calculate the equation of the line
 To reduce the effect of noise more than one element
(elements in a neighborhood) in the accumulator
array are increased

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3.5 Line Detection by Hough
Transform

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4.1 Hough Transform for Detection
of Circles
 The parametric equation of the circle can
be written as
( x  a )  ( y  b)  r
2 2 2

 The equation has three parameters – a, b, r

 The curve obtained in the Hough Transform
space for each edge point will be a right
circular cone
 Point of intersection of the cones gives the
parameters a, b, r

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4.2 Hough Transform for Circles
 Gradient at each edge point is known
 We know the line on which the center will
lie
x0  xi  R cos 
y0  yi  R sin 

 If the radius is also known then center of

the circle can be located

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4.3 Detection of circle by Hough
Transform - example

Original Image Circles detected by Canny Edge Detector

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4.4 Detection of circle by Hough
Transform - contd

Hough Transform of the edge detected image Detected Circles

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5.1 Recap
 In detecting lines
 The parameters  and  were found out relative
to the origin (0,0)
 In detecting circles
 The radius and center were found out
 In both the cases we have knowledge of
the shape
 We aim to find out its location and
orientation in the image
 The idea can be extended to shapes like
ellipses, parabolas, etc.

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5.2 Parameters for analytic curves

Analytic Form Parameters Equation

Line ,  xcos+ysin=

Circle x0, y0,  (x-xo)2+(y-y0)2=r2

Parabola x0, y0,  (y-y0)2=4(x-xo)

Ellipse x0, y0, a, b, (x-xo)2/a2+(y-y0)2/b2=1

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6.1 Generalized Hough Transform
 The Generalized Hough transform can be
used to detect arbitrary shapes
 Complete specification of the exact shape
of the target object is required in the form
of the R-Table
 Information that can be extracted are
 Location
 Size
 Orientation
 Number of occurrences of that particular shape
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6.2 Creating the R-table
 Algorithm
 Choose a reference point
 Draw a vector from the reference point
to an edge point on the boundary
 Store the information of the vector
against the gradient angle in the R-Table
 There may be more than one entry in
the R-Table corresponding to a gradient
value

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6.3 Generalized Hough Transform -
Algorithm
 Form an Accumulator array to hold the candidate
locations of the reference point
 For each point on the edge
 Compute the gradient direction and determine the
row of the R-Table it corresponds to
 For each entry on the row calculate the candidate
location of the reference point
xc  xi  r cos 
yc  yi  r sin 
 Increase the Accumulator value for that point
 The reference point location is given by the highest
value in the accumulator array

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6.4 Generalized Hough Transform –
Size and Orientation
 The size and orientation of the shape
can be found out by simply
manipulating the R-Table
 For scaling by factor S multiply the R-
Table vectors by S
 For rotation by angle , rotate the
vectors in the R-Table by angle 

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6.5 Generalized Hough Transform –
Advantages and disadvantages
 Advantages
 A method for object recognition
 Robust to partial deformation in shape
 Tolerant to noise
 Can detect multiple occurrences of a
shape in the same pass
 Disadvantages
 Lot of memory and computation is
required

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7.1 Improvisation of the Hough transform for
detecting straight line segments
 Hough Transform lacks the ability to detect
the end points of lines – localized
information is lost during HT
 Peak points in the accumulator can be
difficult to locate in presence of noisy or
parallel edges
 Efficiency of the algorithm decreases if
image becomes too large
 New approach is proposed to reduce these
problems

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7.2 Spatial decomposition
 This technique preserves the localized
information
 Divide the image recursively into
quad-trees, each quad-tree
representing a part of the image i.e.
a sub-image
 The leaf nodes will be voted for
feature points which are in the sub-
image represented by the leaf node

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7.2 Spatial Decomposition of Hough
Transform
 Parameter space is defined from a global
origin rather than a local one
 Each node contains information about the
sub-nodes as well as the number of feature
points in the sub-image represented by the
node
 Pruning of sub-trees is done if the number
of the feature points falls below a threshold
 An accumulator is assigned for each leaf
node

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7.3 Some relations involved in
spatial decomposition
 Consider the following
 Q – any non-leaf node
 F – feature points in the sub-image represented by
this node
 A – parameter space of the sub-image
 The following relations hold true

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7.4 Number of accumulator arrays
required
 Consider the following case
 Size of image = N X N
 Size of leaf node = M X M
 Depth of tree = d (root node = 0)
 Number of accumulator arrays for
only leaf nodes =
 Number of accumulator arrays for all
nodes =

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7.5 Example

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References
 Generalizing The Hough Transform to Detect Arbitrary
Shapes – D H Ballard – 1981
 Spatial Decomposition of The Hough Transform –
Heather and Yang – IEEE computer Society – May
2005
 Hypermedia Image Processing Reference 2 –
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/HIPR2/hipr_top.ht
m

 Machine Vision – Ramesh Jain, Rangachar Kasturi,

Brian G Schunck, McGraw-Hill, 1995
 Machine Vision - Wesley E. Snyder, Hairong Qi,
Cambridge University Press, 2004

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