Segment Hough Transform -- a Novel Hough-based Algorithm for Curve Detection

A new Hough-based algorithm termed segment Hough transform (SHT) is proposed to detect the curve in the binary image. The segment-transform, which is the main idea of the novel approach, makes the curve detection very efficient. Thanks to the chain code termed angle chain code (ACC) as well as the modified direction measurement, the segmentation operation is also considerably fast and precise. Compared with the conventional Hough transform (CHT), our algorithm is dramatically faster (by over 20 times) And when the background is complex, the SHT is about four times faster than the random Hough transform (RHT), Furthermore, the proposed algorithm inherits the high robustness from CHT. In some situations, it is even more accurate. We implement the novel algorithm in an embedded system to estimate passengers flow on the bus. The detection rate is over 95% which indicates it is quite suitable for real-time application.