Robust line detection methods

Line Detection is an important problem that arises in automatic content conversion systems (among other domains). Such a system is used to generate digital documents from hard copies of books, newspapers, etc. Given a black and white image, usually obtained from a scanning device, our task is to identify groups of pixels which form horizontal or vertical lines. There are various techniques used to solve this problem. In this paper we analyze a common approach (using the Hough transform), introduce a new method and compare the results.