Patent US 5,631,982

A system for detecting lines in images using line neighborhoods and a parallel coordinate transformation. The process introduces the concept of line neighborhoods to accommodate the uncertainty in line detection arising from image noise. Because line neighborhoods in Cartesian coordinates have ambiguous and unbounded regions and always overlap one another, a parallel coordinate transform is used to transform Cartesian coordinate image plane line segments to points in a bounded and nonambiguous region of the parallel coordinate transform plane. Line detection then becomes a simple problem of detecting point clusters in the parallel coordinate transform plane.