Circle Detection Using Its Maximal Symmetry Property

Circle detection has long been studied as one of fundamental image processing applications. It is used in divers areas including industrial inspection, medial image analysis, radio astronomy data analysis, and other object recognition applications. The most widely used class of circle detection techniques is the circle Hough transform and its variants. Management of 3 dimensional parameter histogram used in these methods brings about spatial and temporal overheads, and a lot of studies have dealt the problem. This paper proposes a robust circle detection method using maximal symmetry property of circle. The basic idea is that if perpendicular bisectors of pairs of edges are accumulated in image space, center of circle is determined to be the location of highest accumulation. However, directly implementing the idea in image space requires a lot of calculations. The method of this paper reduces the number of calculations by mapping the perpendicular bisectors into parameter space, selecting small number of parameters, and mapping them inversely into image space. Test on 22 images shows the calculations of the proposed method is 0.056% calculations of the basic idea. The test images include simple circles, multiple circles with various sizes, concentric circles, and partially occluded circles. The proposed method detected circles in various situations successfully.