THE CONIC EQUATION HOUGH TRANSFORM FOR IMAGE ANALYSIS

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Significance of Parameters of the Conic Equation Hough Transform for Image Analysis and Detecting Cancerous Tissue in Mammographic Data (March 2006) DRAFT Nicholas Tung, Kalamazoo Area Math and Science Center

Abstract—The Hough transform is used in image recognition for edge linking. An image’s edge points will be identified, usually with a mask, the most common of which are the sobel and canny edge detectors. The Hough transform is used for detecting lines or curves in an image. Each point has a set of equations which will work with it, and by accumulating all points, the best equations can be found. The purpose of this project is to first implement the five-dimensional Hough transform efficiently, and extract the best local maxima in the accumulator. Due to the computational complexity and unexpected adverse effects of low resolution, the accumulator based version of the Hough transform failed. Furthermore, the Hough transform was not ideal for this type of data. Different techniques were able to roughly detect elliptical shapes, but only after separation of edge points with hierarchical linking. Index Terms—Hough complexity, discrete.

transform,

ellipse,

computational

I. INTRODUCTION A. Purpose of the Hough transform The Hough transform is used in image recognition for edge linking. Before the Hough transform, an image’s edge points will be identified, usually with a mask, the most common of which are the sobel and canny edge detectors. These edge detectors will multiply sections of an image with a mask matrix to detect an edge facing usually up, down, left, or right. If one of the mask matrices has a significant value, then there is an indication that there is an edge, and that value will be returned in place of the original location on the image. The canny edge detector uses edge linking to detect subtle edges, and is considered optimal.

Nicholas Tung is a student at the Kalamazoo Area Math and Science Center and Western Michigan University. He is not liable for any inaccuracies in experimentation or implementation. To view the source code, recent documentation, comments, questions, results, and contact information, please go to http://www.ntung.com Æ biography Æ research.

B. Algorithm for the Hough transform The Hough transform is used for detecting lines or curves in an image. Each point has a set of equations which will work with it, and by accumulating all possible equations in a discrete space, the best equations can be found. For example, a certain pixel from the edge map has coordinates in x and y. The basic linear equation y = Ax + B can be expressed as B = y – Ax, so B can be evaluated while x and y are constant, and A varies according bounds, which are parameters. An intersection in two Hough lines represents an A and B that two points share. Compared to finding all regression equations for each set of points, it has a relatively low time complexity. The advantage of the Hough transform over simple line fitting is that it can represent multiple and unrelated best fit lines in a scene. C. Adaptive Hough transform Because the accumulator is discrete, it is difficult to detect peaks accurately. It is necessary to either use a very large resolution, the adaptive Hough transform, or a method which uses the basic concept of overlying parameters but does not use the accumulator. If the resolution is too little, too many non-peak points will overlap. The adaptive Hough transform will take the peaks of one image and refine them, so that there is not excess accumulator space used for places where there are no points. This makes assumptions that non-peaks will not contain peaks in another refinement. D. Other techniques Other methods have been devised to avoid the use of an accumulator. One relatively simple and elegant solution is the use of radius histogramming, which will pick a point on the image to be the center of a circle, and create a histogram of the distances of all edge points from the theoretical center point. If there is a strong correlation, it is probable that there is a circle at that location. Although it is still at a relatively similar time complexity (nx * ny * nradius), it does not require a memory-expensive accumulator, and further analysis of the accumulator can suggest the location of the actual

THE CONIC EQUATION HOUGH TRANSFORM FOR IMAGE ANALYSIS center, reducing the amount of center locations to try (4). E. Applications of the Hough transform The Hough transform has been used in many feature identification algorithms in imaging. Medical applications, such as identification of tumors in mammograms may be assisted by comparing the Hough transform representation of an unknown image to known cancerous and benign suspicious regions. This application generally uses the circular representation of edge points. Geological features, such as volcano images can be processed with the Hough transform to identify linear structures in a satellite image (2). Similarly, building identification from satellite images also uses the linear Hough transform to identify important features. F. Statement of Purpose This research project will attempt to measure the effectiveness of several variations on the Hough transform in five dimensions using the conic section equation, and the most determining characteristics of a geometric shape representing a cancerous tumor.

II. METHODS

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applied to remove spurious maxima, as well as to correct lines which did not appear to intersect because of aliasing. The maxima were then taken from the accumulator, where all points within a scalar threshold of the global maxima were extracted. The value of 0.7 yielded decent results for observable linear correlation. When a maximum was removed, it and its neighboring pixels were set to zero. Non-maxima points may be further reduced by checking the next highest peak to see if it had bordered a previous maximum, but the more standard hierarchical linking algorithm was used in this implementation. Points which probably belonged to the same maximum were joined using hierarchical linking; this was chosen because it was not sensitive to the number of points per mean, such as the K-Means algorithm. The covariance was then determined so that the bounds could be established for the next refinement. This was done using expectation maximization, which will find a “best fit” set of Gaussians, given an initial set of means and covariances. First, accumulator values less than 0.1 were removed, to avoid an image such as figure 2 below. The means were initialized to the output from the hierarchical linking, and the covariance was initialized to the covariance of the whole image. The algorithm was stopped when the means and covariances were not significantly changing.

A. Attempts at the Conic Hough transform 1) Applying the Hough transform The Hough transform is applied, using a variable number of parameters (to allow for different equations). The tangent function was used to generate the bounds because it allowed for slopes approaching infinity, which is usually circumvented in lower dimensions by using an angular representation of a line. The dependent variable is evaluated based on the other parameters and stored in an accumulator array (see figure 1). Although the large time complexity is rather inevitable, some of latency is caused by the memory, which can be aided by storing only the maximum of each dependent variable in a discreet space (4). This was not currently implemented. Figure 2. All values from the Hough accumulator

3) Refining the means and original data correlation The maxima were refined by running the Hough transform on every one. The second set of accumulators for figure 1 appears below in figure 3. After significant refining, equation correlation was performed to remove what had been shared values for points in a very low resolution, but in fact had no correlation; in this example the lower left and upper right initial peaks had no real correlation with the points.

Figure 1. Initial accumulator using tangent scaling for independent variables.

2) Extracting the results from the accumulator The most difficult part of the experiment was extracting the peaks from the accumulator. First, Gaussian smoothing was

THE CONIC EQUATION HOUGH TRANSFORM FOR IMAGE ANALYSIS

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Figure 5. The resolution affected the relative size of a peak. Left is the accumulator with a 100x100 resolution, the right is at 40x40.

Figure 3. Bounds for refining the Hough transform.

B. Further Research The technique of radius histogramming was useful for its purpose but not effective at detecting distorted circles or ellipses (figure 4). A custom technique similar to radius histogramming involved picking a center, and rotating the image 180 degrees around the center. If the center was of an ellipse, then there would be a large value by overlapping the original image with the rotated one. A variant inspired by radius histogramming, designed by the researcher, performed similarly well on elliptical shapes, but failed for more general images. However with denser images, it was not successful.

Finding components of an image using hierarchical linking and then applying the transform described above was somewhat successful for easily separated elliptical shapes, which had to be identified with hierarchical linking. Another very significant problem was the use of the edge detection algorithms. They often returned far too much excess data. Using simpler images of brain tumors, adequate results were achieved when removing components by color and using Gaussian smoothing; unfortunately this could not be done to the mammogram.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Nicholas Tung thanks Dr. Ihklas Abdel-Qader for her help in this project. Dr. Abdel-Qader provided great insight, support in discussion and with reference material, and inspiration in the fascinating area of image recognition.

REFERENCES [1]

[2]

[3] Figure 4. Radius histogramming on an ellipse

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Linear correlation was successful, but the 5-d Hough transform is unable to detect any of the means because of errors in the discrete accumulator, as well as a time complexity that restricted its accumulator to small sizes. The effects of a low resolution clearly had detriments above requiring a lot of refinements. First, the size of each mean was larger relative to the accumulator (Figure 4). Second, discontinuity between some variables, such as coefficient for y^2, i.e. "slicing" the accumulator along the axis for y^2 would result in very different images. Also, weaknesses in hierarchical linking led to too many peaks for variance detection.

[4]

[5]

D. Illingworth, J and J. Kittler. The Adaptive Hough Transform. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 1987. vol. 9, no. 5, p. 690 – 698. Argialas, D. P. and O. D. Mavrantza. Comparison of Edge Detection and Hough Trasnform Techinques for the Extraction of Geological Features. The International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, vol. 34, part XXX, p. 790-794. Gonzalez , Rafael C. and Richard E (2001). Woods. Digital Image Processing. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc. Ioannou, Dimitrios, Walter Huda, and Andrew F. Laine. Circle Recognition Through a 2D Hough Transform and Radius Histogramming, Image and Vision Computing (17), No. 1, January 1999, p. 15-26. Ferrari, RJ et. al. Automatic identification of the pectoral muscle in mammograms. IEEE Trans Med Imaging, vol. 23, February 2004, p. 232-45.

Significance of Parameters of the Conic Equation ...

THE CONIC EQUATION HOUGH TRANSFORM FOR IMAGE ANALYSIS. 1. Significance of ... for each set of points, it has a relatively low time complexity. The advantage of the ... building identification from satellite images also uses the linear Hough ... left and upper right initial peaks had no real correlation with the points.

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