A Persistence-Based Approach to Automatic Detection of Line Segments in Images

Abstract

Edge detection algorithms usually produce a discrete set of edgels (edge pixels) in a given image on a fixed pixel grid. We consider the harder problem of detecting continuous straight line segments at subpixel resolution. The state-of-the art Line Segment Detection Algorithm (LSDA) outputs unordered line segments whose total number cannot be easily controlled. Another motivation to improve the LSDA is to avoid intersections and small angles between line segments, hence difficulties in higher level tasks such as segmentation or contour extraction.