Real-Time Straight-Line Detection for XGA-Size Videos by Hough Transform with Parallelized Voting Procedures

The Hough Transform (HT) is a method for extracting straight lines from an edge image. The main limitations of the HT for usage in actual applications are computation time and storage requirements. This paper reports a hardware architecture for HT implementation on a Field Programmable Gate Array (F...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jungang Guan, Fengwei An, Xiangyu Zhang, Lei Chen, Hans Jürgen Mattausch
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2017-01-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/2/270
Description
Summary:The Hough Transform (HT) is a method for extracting straight lines from an edge image. The main limitations of the HT for usage in actual applications are computation time and storage requirements. This paper reports a hardware architecture for HT implementation on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) with parallelized voting procedure. The 2-dimensional accumulator array, namely the Hough space in parametric form (ρ, θ), for computing the strength of each line by a voting mechanism is mapped on a 1-dimensional array with regular increments of θ. Then, this Hough space is divided into a number of parallel parts. The computation of (ρ, θ) for the edge pixels and the voting procedure for straight-line determination are therefore executable in parallel. In addition, a synchronized initialization for the Hough space further increases the speed of straight-line detection, so that XGA video processing becomes possible. The designed prototype system has been synthesized on a DE4 platform with a Stratix-IV FPGA device. In the application of road-lane detection, the average processing speed of this HT implementation is 5.4ms per XGA-frame at 200 MHz working frequency.
ISSN:1424-8220