Benchmarking Hough transform architectures for real-time

This paper reviews the Hough transform hardware implementations, with a specific analysis of the architectures that explicitly address the "real-time" issue. The work presents an introduction for a critical assessment of the notion of "real-time", especially for what concerns modern multimedia applications. The main contribution of this work is the proposal of a new metric for measuring the performance of Hough transform architectures against a given definition of "real-time". The basic idea is that there is no single set of constraints that define "real-time" for every application domain, and that even the simplest case of Hough transform for line detection, must be properly characterized within a specific application domain. The architectures are classified and evaluated, after a proper characterization of the Hough transform complexity, in terms of dimensions of parameter space and time complexity. (C) 2000 Academic Press.