Multiscale detection of circles, ellipses and line segments, robust to noise and blur

Abstract

This paper proposes a basic taxonomy of image contours. Our goal is to classify smooth curves into five categories, namely, circles, ellipses, line segments, arcs of circles and arcs of ellipses. These geometrical structures have been chosen as they serve as input of many computer vision tasks. The proposed strategy is applied on a set of initial disjoint contours, which are grouped together to form the aforementioned structures. These, in turn, are validated using an a contrario approach that guarantees a reduced number of false detections. The use of a multiscale strategy permits the detection at different resolution levels, which makes the method robust to noise and blur.