High-speed hough transform processor and its applications to automatic inspection and measurement

We have developed a processor with dedicated hardware for performing high-speed Hough transforms, to enable real time inspection and measurement of linear boundaries in gray scale images. The Hough transform method for recognition can cope effectively with noisy backgrounds and gaps in boundaries. However, long computation time and large memory requirements have been preventing it from being used in real time applications. This paper presents an architecture devised to solve those problems. It also provides examples of application to automatic inspection and measurement of objects in factories and laboratories. It took less than one second from picture input to straight line parameter reproduction for these examples.