Elliptical object detection by a modified ransac with sampling constraint from boundary Curves' clustering

This paper proposes a method for detecting ellipses from an image despite (1) multiple colors within the ellipses, (2) partially occluded ellipses' boundaries, (3) noisy, locally deformed boundaries of ellipses, (4) presence of multiple objects other than the ellipses in the image, and (5) combinations of (1) through (4). After boundary curves are obtained by edge detection, by utilizing the first-order difference curves of the edge orientation of each pixel in the boundary curves, a segment-reconnect method obtains boundary clusters. Then, a modified RANSAC detects ellipses by choosing five pixels randomly from the boundary clusters, where overlapped ellipses are merged. Experimental results using synthesized images and real images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method together with comparison with the Randomized Hough Transform, a wellknown conventional method.