A Survey of the Hough Transform

We present a comprehensive review of the Hough transform, HT, in image processing and computer vision. It has long been recognized as a technique of almost unique promise for shape and motion analysis in images containing noisy, missing, and extraneous data but its adoption has been slow due to its computational and storage complexity and the lack of a detailed understanding of its properties. However, in recent years much progress has been made in these areas. In this review we discuss ideas for the efficient implementation of the HT and present results on the analytic and empirical performance of various methods. We also report the relationship of Hough methods and other transforms and consider applications in which the HT has been used. It seems likely that the HT will be an increasingly used technique and we hope that this survey will provide a useful guide to quickly acquaint researchers with the main literature in this research area.