How the Hough Transform Was Invented

The Hough transform, used to detect geometric features like straight lines in digital images, is likely one of the most widely used procedures in computer vision [1], [2], [3]. Although nobody tabulates the frequency with which any particular algorithm or technique is used in computer vision, we can get some idea of its popularity by noting that Google Scholar returns over 22,000 citations in response to the search term Hough transform". This is several times larger than the number of citations found for other classical computer vision operators such as the Sobel operator [4] or the Canny edge detector [5]. © 2009 IEEE."