Fast and robust ellipse detector based on edge following method

This study presents a fast and robust ellipse detector based on edge following method. The detector first extracts segments using an edge predictor based on curvature analysis. Then, line segments are generated based on length condition other than least-squares approximation. After that, potential ellipses are detected based on edge curvature and convexity. In addition, a re-find contours detection method is introduced to improve the accuracy by searching edge points in the missing part of the ellipse. The performance of the detector has been tested on different datasets containing both synthetic and real images with three other algorithms based on the edge following method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method always has the fastest execution time. Besides, it advances the state of the art in accuracy in most cases. Generally speaking, it is a fast, robust and effective ellipse detector for real-time applications.