Real-Time Line Detection Using Accelerated High-Resolution Hough Transform

Hough transform is a well-known and popular algorithm for detecting lines in raster images. The standard Hough transform is rather slow to be usable in real-time, so different accelerated and approximated algorithms exist. This paper proposes a modified accumulation scheme for the Hough transform, which makes it suitable for computer systems with small but fast read-write memory – such as the today’s GPUs. The proposed algorithm is evaluated both on synthetic binary images and on complex high resolution real-world photos. The results show that using today’s commodity graphics chips, the Hough transform can be computed at interactive frame rates even with a high resolution of the Hough space and with the Hough transform fully computed.