Optimized use of Hough transform in an ultrasound measurement system for human signature analysis

Abstract

Human motion analysis is a task of increasing importance in several modern application fields, such as in medicine, avionics, security, and disaster recovery. In this paper, the use of Hough transform is considered and discussed in the scenario of human motion analysis. In particular, the influence of some transform parameters is investigated with the aim of improving Hough transform set-up when used in a measurement approach for human motion analysis. To this purpose, Hough transform has been applied to a set of results obtained by exploiting a suitable measurement system developed by the same authors, in the specific case of ultrasound waves. Such results have been obtained by using some reference images in the form of spectrograms achieved by using the system along with a purposely developed reference target emulating some human body movements. The results show that the considered measurement system, and more generally the human motion analysis and detection system, can be optimized by a proper set-up and use of Hough transform algorithm.