An improved Hough transform for line detection

The Hough transform is a popular robust method for detecting lines in an image. However, the computational complexity and storage requirements are the main bottlenecks of the standard Hough transform (SHT) applied on real-time detection. Therefore, many variations on Hough's original transform have been proposed to alleviate the computational and storage burden. In this paper, an improved Hough transform for line detection is proposed, which shares the similar characteristic of the modified Hough transform (MHT) and the Windowed random Hough transform (RHT). The proposed method employs the “many-to-one” mapping and sliding window neighborhood technique to alleviate the computational and storage load. Extensive experiments indicate that the proposed method has achieved a much better performance than the previous variations of Hough transform.