A Survey on Hough Transform, Theory, Techniques and Applications

TL;DR

This survey reviews the evolution, techniques, and diverse applications of the Hough transform, emphasizing its variations, computational challenges, and use on different image types, highlighting its enduring significance and future potential.

Contribution

It provides an extensive overview of Hough transform milestones, variations, solutions to computational issues, and a classification of applications, including recent and unconventional uses.

Findings

Hough transform has a rich history with noise immunity and expandability.

Variations of the transform address storage and computation challenges.

The transform is widely applicable to binary, gray, and color images.

Abstract

For more than half a century, the Hough transform is ever-expanding for new frontiers. Thousands of research papers and numerous applications have evolved over the decades. Carrying out an all-inclusive survey is hardly possible and enormously space-demanding. What we care about here is emphasizing some of the most crucial milestones of the transform. We describe its variations elaborating on the basic ones such as the line and circle Hough transforms. The high demand for storage and computation time is clarified with different solution approaches. Since most uses of the transform take place on binary images, we have been concerned with the work done directly on gray or color images. The myriad applications of the standard transform and its variations have been classified highlighting the up-to-date and the unconventional ones. Due to its merits such as noise-immunity and expandability, the transform has an excellent history, and a bright future as well.