Primitive Extraction Using Incremental Curve Generation

This paper diacusses the problem of extracting curves, such as lines, circlea and ellipses, from 2D edge data. Our praposed extraction algorithm operates by taking random Barnples of minima! sitbsets, and thcn matching the curvc through each minimal s u b ~ e t against the edge data. We perform the time-critical curve matching step using a new approach based on incremental curve generation dgarithrna. These algorithms have been used previol~sly in thecomputer-graphics field, brlt never, t o our knowledge, For th ia purpase. This simple idea ha^ the potential to make real-time curve extraction possible using very inexpenfiive hardware. It has a number of advantages over the Hough transform, which is the most common method of extracting curves.