A Circular Band Extraction Method Based on Extended Hough Transform

Abstract

This study proposes a method to detect thick circular curves, called circular bands, using the extended Hough Transform. This method enables the direct input of a binary image without requiring pre-processing in edge detection or a post-processing stage to recover the band in the original image. Thus, the useful positional relationships among the pixels of a circular band are preserved for subsequent processing. Several experiments involving the recognition of general circular band objects, traffic signs, and a tunnel entrance in real scenes were conducted to establish the feasibility and applicability of the proposed approach.