Hough Transform - History

History

It was initially invented for machine analysis of bubble chamber photographs (Hough, 1959).

The Hough transform was patented as U.S. Patent 3,069,654 in 1962 and assigned to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission with the name "Method and Means for Recognizing Complex Patterns". This patent uses a slope-intercept parametrization for straight lines, which awkwardly leads to an unbounded transform space since the slope can go to infinity.

The rho-theta parametrization universally used today was first described in

Duda, R. O. and P. E. Hart, "Use of the Hough Transformation to Detect Lines and Curves in Pictures," Comm. ACM, Vol. 15, pp. 11–15 (January, 1972),

although it was already standard for the Radon transform since at least the 1930s.

O'Gorman and Clowes' variation is described in

Frank O'Gorman, MB Clowes: Finding Picture Edges Through Collinearity of Feature Points. IEEE Trans. Computers 25(4): 449-456 (1976)

The story of how the modern form of the Hough transform was invented is given in

Hart, P. E., "How the Hough Transform was Invented", IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Vol 26, Issue 6, pp 18 - 22 (November, 2009) .

Read more about this topic:  Hough Transform

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
    Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)