Accelerated Hough transform using rectangular image decomposition

A novel fast method for evaluating the Hough transform is proposed, which can be used to accelerate detection of prevalent linear formations in binary images. An image is decomposed using rectangular blocks and the contribution of each whole block to the Hough transform space is evaluated, rather than the contribution of each image point. The resulting acceleration in the calculation of the Hough transform field is demonstrated in two image processing experiments related to object axis identification and skew detection of digitised documents