A tabu search method for geometric primitive extraction

In this paper, we propose a novel method for extracting the geometric primitives from geometric data, which is essentially an optimization problem. Specifically, we use tabu search to solve geometric primitive extraction problem. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt that tabu search is used in computer vision. Our tabu search (TS) has a number of advantages: (1) TS avoids entrapment in local minima and continues the search to give a near-optimal final solution; (2) TS is very general and conceptually much simpler than either simulated annealing (SA) or genetic algorithm (GA); (3) TS has no special space requirement and is very easy to implement (the entire procedure only occupies a few lines of code); (4) our TS-based method can successfully extract some geometric primitives which are specially difficult for the traditional methods such as Hough Transform (HT) and Robust Statistics(RS). TS is a flexible framework of a variety of strategies originating from artificial intelligence and is therefore open to further improvement. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.