A hierarchical approach to line extraction

An efficient method for finding straight lines in edge maps is described. The algorithm is based on a pyramid structure. At the bottom level of the pyramid, short line segments are detected by applying a Hough transform to small subimages. The algorithm proceeds, bottom up, from this low-level description by grouping line segments within the local neighborhoods into longer lines. Line segments which have local support propagate up the hierarchy and take part in grouping at higher levels. The length of a line determines approximately the level in the pyramid to which it propagates, and a hierarchical description of the line segments in a scene is obtained. The line-segment-grouping process is also based on a Hough transform. The method is quite efficient and has an attractive architecture which is suitable for parallel implementation