Detection of linear bands in gray-scale images based on the Euclidean distance transform and the Hough transform

Abstract

A linear band, which is a straight line segment with some width (i.e., thickness), is a more structured, higher-level feature compared to edge or line features. In spite of the usefulness of linear bands as features, papers dealing with their detection problem are rare. In this paper, we propose a new method for detecting linear bands in gray-scale images. We first talk about our opinion on what types of linear bands a desirable detector should be able to detect, and then give a description on how we designed our detector to achieve the goal. Our method consists basically of four parts: edge detection, Euclidean distance transform, Hough transform, and line segment extraction. Experimental results show that our method is practical and applicable to real natural images.