A Circular Hough Transform Hardware for Industrial Circle Detection Applications

The Hough transform (Hough, 1962) has been used to characterize analytic features. It was first applied to the recognition of straight lines, and later extended to circles, ellipses and arbitrary shaped objects. Its main disadvantage is the computational and storage requirements increase as a power of the dimensionality of the curve. It is not difficult to implement circular Hough transform (CHT) algorithm on modern personal computer. However, we intend to use FPGA or ASIC to perform CHT in this article. Modern FPGAs are capable of performing high speed operation and have large amount of embedded memory. The whole CHT circuitry with accumulator array excluded can be fitted into Alterareg Stratixreg 1S25 chip which has more than 1 Mb RAM embedded