Extracting straight lines by sequential fuzzy clustering

In clustering line segments into a straight line, threshold-based methods such as hierarchical clustering are often used. The line segments comprising a straight line often get misaligned due to noise. Threshold-based methods have difficulty clustering such line segments. A new cluster extraction method is proposed to cope with this problem. This method extracts fuzzy clusters one by one using matrix computation. We evaluated our clustering method using hand-written drawings and obtained promising results.