Rectangle detection based on a windowed Hough transform

The problem of detecting rectangular structures in images arises in many applications, from building extraction in aerial images to particle detection in cryo-electron microscopy. This paper proposes a new technique for rectangle detection using a windowed Hough transform. Every pixel of the image is scanned, and a sliding window is used to compute the Hough transform of small regions of the image. Peaks of the Hough image (which correspond to line segments) are then extracted, and a rectangle is detected when four extracted peaks satisfy certain geometric conditions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique produced promising results for both synthetic and natural images.