Moment and curvature preserving technique for accurate ellipse boundary detection

Circles and their elliptic projections are very commonly used image features in computer vision applications. Thus, it is very important to be able to determine their location in an accurate manner. A technique for determining an ellipse boundary with subpixel precision is proposed. The technique, called the moment and curvature preserving detection (MCP), utilizes the first three intensity moments and the intensity gradient of the image. The idea of using moments for subpixel edge detection is not new, but in the case of ellipses the moments do not provide sufficient information for precise detection. However, if the local curvature is augmented to the observations, the ellipse boundary can be determined reliably