Fast parallel hough transform linear features extracting method based on graphics processing units

The Hough transform has been widely used to determine the location and orientation of straight lines in images in the fields of computer vision and image processing. The problem of the traditional Hough transform is the large amount of calculation and inability to meet the requirements of real-time computing. In this paper, a new parallel Hough transform method which is based on GPU is presented to solve the problem. The method which uses the parallel computing accelerates the computing process and greatly improves the computational efficiency. Therefore, the image processing calculations for linear features extraction process can achieve real-time requirements. The comparative experiment shows that the computing time can reach up to 3ms, and the speed-up ratio can be around 20 times.