Iterative Generalized Hough Transform using Multiresolution Search

This paper presents an efficient method for automatically detecting objects in a given image. The GHT is a robust template matching algorithm for automatic object detection in order to find objects of various shapes. Many different templates are applied by the GHT in order to find objects of various shapes and size. Every boundary detected by the GHT scan be used as an initial outline for more precise contour-finding techniques. The main weakness of the GHT is the excessive time and memory requirements. In order to overcome this drawback, the proposed algorithm uses a multiresolution search by scaling down the original image to half-sized and quarter-sized images. Using the information from the first iterative GHT on a quarter-sized image, the range of nuclear sizes is determined to limit the parameter space of the half-sized image. After the second iterative GHT on the half-sized image, nuclei are detected by the fine search and segmented with edge information which helps determine the exact boundary. The experimental results show that this method gives reduction in computation time and memory usage without loss of accuracy.