Connectivity-Enforcing Hough Transform for the Robust Extraction of Line Segments

Global voting schemes based on the Hough transform (HT) have been widely used to robustly detect lines in images. However, since the votes do not take line connectivity into account, these methods do not deal well with cluttered images. In opposition, the so-called local methods enforce connectivity but lack robustness to deal with challenging situations that occur in many realistic scenarios, e.g., when line segments cross or when long segments are corrupted. In this paper, we address the critical limitations of the HT as a line segment extractor by incorporating connectivity in the voting process. This is done by only accounting for the contributions of edge points lying in increasingly larger neighborhoods and whose position and directional content agree with potential line segments. As a result, our method, which we call STRAIGHT (Segment exTRAction by connectivity-enforcInG HT), extracts the longest connected segments in each location of the image, thus also integrating into the HT voting process the usually separate step of individual segment extraction. The usage of the Hough space mapping and a corresponding hierarchical implementation make our approach computationally feasible. We present experiments that illustrate, with synthetic and real images, how STRAIGHT succeeds in extracting complete segments in several situations where current methods fail.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

Automatic detection of weld defects based on hough transform

Weld defect detection is an important application in the field of Non-Destructive Testing (NDT). These defects are mainly due to manufacturing errors or welding processes. In this context, image processing especially segmentation is proposed to detect and localize efficiently different types of defects. It is a challenging task since radiographic images have deficient contrast, poor quality and uneven illumination caused by the inspection techniques. The usual segmentation technique uses a region of interest ROI from the original image. In this article, a robust and automatic method is presented to detect linear defect from the original image without selection of ROI based on canny detector and a modified `Hough Transform' technique. This task can be subdivided into the following steps: firstly, preprocessing step with Gaussian filter and contrast stretching; secondly, segmentation technique is used to isolate weld region from background and non-weld using Adaptative Thresholding and to extract edges; thirdly, detection, location of linear defect and limiting the welding area by Hough Transform. The experimental results show that our proposed method gives good performance for industrial radiographic images

Edge and Line Feature Extraction Based on Covariance Models

age segmentation based on contour extraction usually involves three stages of image operations: feature extraction, edge detection and edge linking. This paper is devoted to the first stage: a method to design feature extractors used to detect edges from noisy and/or blurred images. The method relies on a model that describes the existence of image discontinuities (e.g. edges) in terms of covariance functions. The feature extractor transforms the input image into a “log-likelihood ratio” image. Such an image is a good starting point of the edge detection stage since it represents a balanced trade-off between signal-to-noise ratio and the ability to resolve detailed structures. For 1-D signals, the performance of the edge detector based on this feature extractor is quantitatively assessed by the so called “average risk measure”. The results are compared with the performances of 1-D edge detectors known from literature. Generalizations to 2-D operators are given. Applications on real world images are presented showing the capability of the covariance model to build edge and line feature extractors. Finally it is shown that the covariance model can be coupled to a MRF-model of edge configurations so as to arrive at a maximum a posteriori estimate of the edges or lines in the image