Detection of Broken Ellipses by the Hough Transforms and Multiresolutional Images
Takashi Watanabe, Toshihiro Shibata · Systems and Computers in Japan · 1991
Abstract This paper discusses the problem of separating and detecting ellipse patterns. The traditional ellipse detection methods have assumed contour lines to be connected. Thus, they have the disadvantage of not being able to detect ellipses whose contours are broken considerably due to noise and overlapping. Thus, a new ellipse detection algorithm is presented which can cope with images such that many ellipses of arbitrary shapes are mixed and connectivities of contours are missing completely due to noise, and that parts of contours are lost because of overlapping. The proposed algorithm is based on the Merlin‐Farber method, a kind of Hough transforms, and the multiresolutional images and the least‐square method are incorporated. Good detection results were obtained in the experiments implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.