Finding Line Segments by Surface Fitting to the Hough Transform

We describe a method based on the Hough transform to compute a set of parameters that completely describe line segments. By com- plete, we mean the description includes the endpoints of each segment as well as the num- ber of points along the segment, and, assum- ing a noise model N, the parameter(s) of N. The method involves fitting a surface locally to the Hough array, where the variables of the fit are the parameters we are looking for. In ad- dition to providing a complete description for each segment, the computed estimates of p and 9 are better than the resolution of the Hough array H(p, 9) so that a relatively low resolution H may be used.