Extraction of Circles from Arcs Segmented into Short Straight Lines

paper presents a new method that is capable of extracting circles from complicated and heavily corrupted images, which is not based on the Hough transform (HT). The proposed method consists of three parts. First, we approximately detect short straight lines from the image by using a fast line extraction algorithm. Second, it uses a least squares fitting algorithm for arc segments. The arc segments are used to calculate accurate circle parameters instead of using a parameter space. Finally, by using the segmented arcs we extract circles. Tests performed on synthetic and real-world images show that the algorithm quickly and accurately extracts circles from complicated and heavily corrupted images.