History
It was initially invented for machine analysis of bubble chamber photographs (Hough, 1959).
The Hough transform was patented as U.S. Patent 3,069,654 in 1962 and assigned to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission with the name "Method and Means for Recognizing Complex Patterns". This patent uses a slope-intercept parametrization for straight lines, which awkwardly leads to an unbounded transform space since the slope can go to infinity.
The rho-theta parametrization universally used today was first described in
- Duda, R. O. and P. E. Hart, "Use of the Hough Transformation to Detect Lines and Curves in Pictures," Comm. ACM, Vol. 15, pp. 11–15 (January, 1972),
although it was already standard for the Radon transform since at least the 1930s.
O'Gorman and Clowes' variation is described in
- Frank O'Gorman, MB Clowes: Finding Picture Edges Through Collinearity of Feature Points. IEEE Trans. Computers 25(4): 449-456 (1976)
The story of how the modern form of the Hough transform was invented is given in
- Hart, P. E., "How the Hough Transform was Invented", IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Vol 26, Issue 6, pp 18 - 22 (November, 2009) .
Read more about this topic: Hough Transform
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