On Detecting Spatial Regularity in Noisy Images

Abstract Detecting spatial regularity in images arises in computer vision, scene analysis, military applications, and other areas. In this paper we present an O (n 5 2 ) algorithm that reports all maximal equally-spaced collinear subsets. The algorithm is robust in that it can tolerate noise or imprecision that may be inherent in the measuring process, where the error threshold is a user-specified parameter. Our method also generalizes to higher dimensions.