A new circle/ellipse detector using genetic algorithms

A new circle and ellipse detector is presented in this paper. The proposed method adopts a hybrid scheme which consists of a genetic algorithm (GA) phase and a local search phase. In the GA phase, an efficient fitness evaluation procedure and specific genetic operators are proposed for this application. The candidates with fitness values above a threshold are added into a candidate list. In the local search phase, the members of the candidate list are locally improved and their fitness values fall into two groups. The candidates belonging to the group with higher fitness values are output. The experimental results show that the proposed method can detect circles and ellipses correctly, and the computation and storage cost is very little. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.