Extracting Straight Lines by Sequential Fuzzy Clustering

In clustering line segments into a straight line, threshold-based methods such as hierarchical clustering are often used. The line segments comprising a straight line often get misaligned due to noise. Thresholdbased methods have difficulty clustering such line segments. A new cluster extraction method is proposed to cope with this problem. This method extracts fuzzy clusters one by one using matrix computation. We evaluated our clustering method using hand-written drawings and obtained promising results. 1 Introduction Extraction of lines from an image is an essential task in computer vision. Many authors have reported various algorithms for line extraction, such as Hough Transformation and gradientbased methods[2]. An effective approach to line extraction is by clustering line segments [5, 6]. Line segments are obtained by applying a line fitting process to the output of edge detection process. A line segment is a small geometric structure defined by two end points. In many cases, l..