Abstract#R##N##R##N#This paper discusses the problem of separating and detecting ellipse patterns. The tradiational ellipse detection methods have assumed contour lines to be connected. Thus, they are disadvantageous in that they cannot detect ellipses whose contours are broken considerably due to noise and overlapping.#R##N##R##N##R##N##R##N#Here, a new ellipse detection algorithm is presented which can cope with images such that many ellipses of arbitrary shapes are mixed and connectivities of contours are missing completely due to noise and that parts of contours are lost due to overlapping. The proposed algorithm is based on the Merlin-Farber method, a kind of Hough transform, and the multiresolutional images and the least-square method are incorporated. Good detection results were obtained in the experiments implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
['Takashi Watanabe', 'Toshihiro Shibata']
Detection of broken ellipses by the hough transforms and multiresolutional images