Real-time detection of line segments on FPGA

In this paper, we propose an approach for detecting line segments in real-time by merging fixed-size short line segments. In many hardware systems, a Hough Transform has been used for detecting line segments. The Hough Transform is robust to noises, but it requires large memory space, and more space is required for images with higher resolution. Line detection is a primitive task which is frequently used for higher-level image processing. Therefore, it is important to detect the line segments using a small circuit with less on-chip memory. Our circuit based on the merging of fixed-size short line segments is small (9.2K LUTs), and uses only 6 block RAMs. Its performance is 200 fps for 640 × 480 pixel images.