On the Sensitivity of the Hough Transform for Object Recognition

A common method for finding an object's pose is the generalized Hough transform, which accumulates evidence for possible coordinate transformations in a parameter space and takes large clusters of similar transformations as evidence of a correct solution. We analyze this approach by deriv...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Grimson, W. Eric L., Huttenlocher, David
Language:en_US
Published: 2004
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/6039
Description
Summary:A common method for finding an object's pose is the generalized Hough transform, which accumulates evidence for possible coordinate transformations in a parameter space and takes large clusters of similar transformations as evidence of a correct solution. We analyze this approach by deriving theoretical bounds on the set of transformations consistent with each data-model feature pairing, and by deriving bounds on the likelihood of false peaks in the parameter space, as a function of noise, occlusion, and tessellation effects. We argue that blithely applying such methods to complex recognition tasks is a risky proposition, as the probability of false positives can be very high.