Consistency-based ellipse detection method for complicated images

Abstract

Accurate ellipse detection in complicated images is a challenging problem due to corruptions from image clutter, noise, or occlusion of other objects. To cope with this problem, an edge-following-based ellipse detection method is proposed which promotes the performances of the subprocesses based on consistency. The ellipse detector models edge connectivity by line segments and exploits inconsistent endpoints of the line segments to split the edge contours into smooth arcs. The smooth arcs are further refined with a novel arc refinement method which iteratively improves the consistency degree of the smooth arc. A two-phase arc integration method is developed to group disconnected elliptical arcs belonging to the same ellipse, and two constraints based on consistency are defined to increase the effectiveness and speed of the merging process. Finally, an efficient ellipse validation method is proposed to evaluate the saliency of the elliptic hypotheses. Detailed evaluation on synthetic images shows that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art ellipse detection methods in terms of effectiveness and speed. Additionally, we test our detector on three challenging real-world datasets. The F-measure score and execution time of results demonstrate that our method is effective and fast in complicated images. Therefore, the proposed method is suitable for practical applications.