CONNECTIVE HOUGH TRANSFORM

A method to extend the Hough transform (HT) to detect connectivity is reported. The connective HT reduces the computational complexity of the Dynamic Combinatorial HT (DCHT)1 and increases the S/N ratio of the peak in its accumulator. It may be regarded as a principled method for curve tracing. A general method to improve the computational efficiency of the DCHT by probabilistic selection of interesting fixation points is also introduced. The method may also be adapted as a local connectivity operator. Applications of the connective HT to junction detection and adaptive line detection are also described.