Improving the Generalized Hough Transform Through Imperfect Grouping

This paper analyses the improvements that can be gained in the generalized Hough transform method for recognizing objects through the use of imperfect perceptual grouping techniques. In particular, we consider simple grouping techniques that determine pairs of points that are likely to belong to the same object using a criterion based on connectedness in the image edge map. It is shown that such imperfect grouping techniques can considerably improve both the efficiency and accuracy of object recognition. Experiments are described that demonstrate the improvements in performance. Keywords: object recognition, generalized Hough transform, perceptual grouping 1 Introduction Object recognition methods for complex problems have been plagued by both poor speed and a high incidence of false alarms. The primary source of both of these problems is clutter in the image. Such image clutter not only requires considerable computation to process, but also yields false positive instances of the obj..