Optimising the application of the Hough transform for automatic feature extraction from geoscientific images

We have adapted the Hough transform to extract linear features successfully from geoscientific datasets. The Hough transform is used in an automatic technique, which makes use of a parameter space to describe features of interest in images. This method has been widely applied in machine vision for recognition of features in highly structured images. Geoscientific data is more demanding. Features of interest within scenes of natural environments exist on all scales, are often partially obscured and the images are usually noisy. Pre-processing of images before the HT is essential. Adaptations of the HT to cope with particular properties of geoscientific data include: optimising the dimensions of the discrete transform domain; using feature-modelling to cancel lines found; transforming multi-scale tiles of the original image and correcting amplitudes in the transformed domain to account for the position bf features. These specific adaptations produce a method for automatic feature detection which requires the user to select only two parameters. Output of the procedure is rich in feature content and accurate, leaving a clean result for statistical analysis. This optimised HT is robust for natural scenes, coping in particular with short line-segments. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.