Detecting function patterns with interval Hough transform

The Hough transform is a feature extraction technique used in image analysis, computer vision and digital image processing. Usually it is used for detecting straight lines and curves. The purpose of the technique is to find imperfect instances of patterns within a certain class of shapes by a voting procedure. An improved Hough transform is proposed by using interval arithmetics in the accumulation phase of the algorithm. The discreteness of the quantization space is considered. The use of interval arithmetics showed to be simpler than other statistical proposals. It is presented a modified Hough transform for detecting function patterns implemented with interval arithmetics. This modified Hough transform was used to analyze the movement of the lung in MR temporal sequence of images. The results obtained with the interval arithmetics implementation were much better when compared with the conventional Hough transform implementation.