Randomized Hough transform (RHT)

A method is developed for calculating the Hough transform (HT) and completing the task of finding global features from binary edge images. The method is based on the fact that a single parameter space point can be determined uniquely with a pair, triple, or generally n-tuple of points from the original picture. Such n-tuples of points can be chosen randomly from the edge image, giving the method the name randomized Hough transform (RHT). The new algorithm reduces the computation time and memory use of the HT drastically. In the standard HT one must calculate one parameter curve in the parameter space for one pixel, whereas in the RHT only one parameter point has to be solved for one n-tuple of points, and the presence of a specific curve in the image is quickly revealed by the accumulation of a small number of parameter points.<<ETX>>