Approach to accurate circle detection: Circular Hough Transform and Local Maxima concept

Detecting circular objects over digital images have received considerable attention from industries for applications such as detection of pellets in pelletization plant, target detection, inspection of manufactured products etc. Several algorithms were proposed in past few years to detect circular features. One powerful approach for circle detection is the Circular Hough Transform and its variants. This article presents an algorithm which is based on CHT and Local Maxima concept. Finding one or several maxima considering different accumulators simultaneously and mapping the found parameters corresponding to the maxima back to the original image is key concept of proposed algorithm. Experiments were performed on real industrial images to validate the efficiency of proposed algorithm regarding good accuracy of detection.