A Comparative Study on the Center-based Iterative Hough Transform

Abstract

Circle detection is one of the most critical aspects of computer vision and has been widely studied and developed in a variety of ways. The Center-based Iterative Hough Transform (CBIHT) is a method for unassisted multiple circle detection, based upon iterative uses of a center-based voting process to determine the circle’s center coordinate. This paper gives a thorough analysis of the CBIHT as well as a comparison with the Standard Hough Transform (SHT) and its well-known variants including the Generalized Hough Transform (GHT) and the Adaptive Hough Transform (AHT). When applied to synthetic and real-life circular images, our accuracy and performance comparison studies show that (i) the CBIHT is more computationally efficient than the SHT’s brute-force algorithm; (ii) the CBIHT’s center-based voting method has greater resilience to noise than the GHT and AHT’s gradient information method; and (iii) the CBIHT’s iterative process provides an adaptability and speed in unassisted multiple circle detection similar to that of the AHT; (iv) yet, the CBIHT requires no parameters for circle detection unlike the GHT and the AHT. All in all, a comparison with other methods highlights the aforementioned merit of the CBIHT, proving the CBIHT to be an excellent choice in detecting the circles with noise in real-life images.