A space saving approach to the Hough transform

Some results are reported on an approach to the vote collecting phase of the Hough transform, particularly of the generalized Hough transform (GHT). The purpose of the analysis is to obtain a reduction in the computational cost of the algorithm that would make it suitable for efficient hardware implementation. The reduction is sought at the level of storage requirements for the accumulator space. The method applied differs from the various approaches that dynamically quantize the accumulator space; it extends previously published work on fixed-size, limited memory by introducing a priori knowledge, in the form of geometry constraints, in the process of votes accumulation. A very simple geometry constraint is embedded in the voting rule. The method is tested in an application to IC inspection. Within the framework of raster scan, real-time image processing, a hardware realization of the algorithm can be based on systolic accumulation of votes in a modified priority queue device