An Implementation of Hough Transform on the GPU

Abstract

Recent Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have many processing cores. To use the powerful computing ability, GPUs are wildly utilized for general purpose processing. The main contribution of this paper is to present a new implementation of Hough transform using the GPU. The Hough transform identifies straight lines in a binary edge image. In our GPU implementation, the voting process in the Hough transform is performed for each degree in parallel. Also, the shared memory is used with bank conflict-free access. We have implemented our parallel algorithm with NVIDIA GeForce GTX680. The experimental results show that the Hough transform for a 51212 image with 33232 edge points can be done in only 0.638ms, while a conventional CPU implementation runs in 43.388ms. Thus, our GPU implementation attains a speed-up factor of 68.