Line detection techniques for automatic content conversion systems

In an image processing application there is often need to identify and extract different morphological elements such as characters or lines. This paper studies one general method of identifying vertical or horizontal lines. However, the techniques described here can be used to detect other analytical objects like circles, or even ellipses. Line Detection is an important add-on to an automatic content conversion system which builds digital documents from scanned papers. After identifying lines, other layout elements can be extracted: columns, paragraphs, tables, headers. The present paper is a study of the Hough Transform for which several new enhancements are introduced.