Ultrafast line detector

This article introduces the fastest line detector so far published in the literature. This algorithm is 14.88 times faster than the next fastest line detector, the EDLines, and 94.7 times faster than the line segment detector. It is hundreds of times faster and more reliable than the Standard Hough Transform. The article also introduces an ingeniously simple method for detecting and combining patterns. The algorithm takes advantage of several look-up tables to recognize and fit straight-line patterns. As the first step, it recognizes any possible 4 x 4 pixel line patterns among the binary edge pixels and then uses several small look-up tables to decide whether the connected patterns form a line or not. It is specially designed for real-time processing of the high-resolution images such as the ones used in computer vision applications.