Hough Circle Transform

Goal

In this tutorial you will learn how to:

  • Use the OpenCV function HoughCircles to detect circles in an image.

Theory

Hough Circle Transform

  • The Hough Circle Transform works in a roughly analogous way to the Hough Line Transform explained in the previous tutorial.

  • In the line detection case, a line was defined by two parameters (r, \theta). In the circle case, we need three parameters to define a circle:

    C : ( x_{center}, y_{center}, r )

    where (x_{center}, y_{center}) define the center position (gree point) and r is the radius, which allows us to completely define a circle, as it can be seen below:

    Result of detecting circles with Hough Transform
  • For sake of efficiency, OpenCV implements a detection method slightly trickier than the standard Hough Transform: The Hough gradient method. For more details, please check the book Learning OpenCV or your favorite Computer Vision bibliography

Code

  1. What does this program do?
    • Loads an image and blur it to reduce the noise
    • Applies the Hough Circle Transform to the blurred image .
    • Display the detected circle in a window.
  2. The sample code that we will explain can be downloaded from here. A slightly fancier version (which shows both Hough standard and probabilistic with trackbars for changing the threshold values) can be found here.
#include "opencv2/highgui/highgui.hpp"
#include "opencv2/imgproc/imgproc.hpp"
#include <iostream>
#include <stdio.h>

using namespace cv;

/** @function main */
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  Mat src, src_gray;

  /// Read the image
  src = imread( argv[1], 1 );

  if( !src.data )
    { return -1; }

  /// Convert it to gray
  cvtColor( src, src_gray, CV_BGR2GRAY );

  /// Reduce the noise so we avoid false circle detection
  GaussianBlur( src_gray, src_gray, Size(9, 9), 2, 2 );

  vector<Vec3f> circles;

  /// Apply the Hough Transform to find the circles
  HoughCircles( src_gray, circles, CV_HOUGH_GRADIENT, 1, src_gray.rows/8, 200, 100, 0, 0 );

  /// Draw the circles detected
  for( size_t i = 0; i < circles.size(); i++ )
  {
      Point center(cvRound(circles[i][0]), cvRound(circles[i][1]));
      int radius = cvRound(circles[i][2]);
      // circle center
      circle( src, center, 3, Scalar(0,255,0), -1, 8, 0 );
      // circle outline
      circle( src, center, radius, Scalar(0,0,255), 3, 8, 0 );
   }

  /// Show your results
  namedWindow( "Hough Circle Transform Demo", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE );
  imshow( "Hough Circle Transform Demo", src );

  waitKey(0);
  return 0;
}

Explanation

  1. Load an image

    src = imread( argv[1], 1 );
    
    if( !src.data )
      { return -1; }
    
  2. Convert it to grayscale:

    cvtColor( src, src_gray, CV_BGR2GRAY );
    
  3. Apply a Gaussian blur to reduce noise and avoid false circle detection:

    GaussianBlur( src_gray, src_gray, Size(9, 9), 2, 2 );
    
  4. Proceed to apply Hough Circle Transform:

    vector<Vec3f> circles;
    
    HoughCircles( src_gray, circles, CV_HOUGH_GRADIENT, 1, src_gray.rows/8, 200, 100, 0, 0 );
    

    with the arguments:

    • src_gray: Input image (grayscale)
    • circles: A vector that stores sets of 3 values: x_{c}, y_{c}, r for each detected circle.
    • CV_HOUGH_GRADIENT: Define the detection method. Currently this is the only one available in OpenCV
    • dp = 1: The inverse ratio of resolution
    • min_dist = src_gray.rows/8: Minimum distance between detected centers
    • param_1 = 200: Upper threshold for the internal Canny edge detector
    • param_2 = 100*: Threshold for center detection.
    • min_radius = 0: Minimum radio to be detected. If unknown, put zero as default.
    • max_radius = 0: Maximum radius to be detected. If unknown, put zero as default
  5. Draw the detected circles:

    for( size_t i = 0; i < circles.size(); i++ )
    {
       Point center(cvRound(circles[i][0]), cvRound(circles[i][1]));
       int radius = cvRound(circles[i][2]);
       // circle center
       circle( src, center, 3, Scalar(0,255,0), -1, 8, 0 );
       // circle outline
       circle( src, center, radius, Scalar(0,0,255), 3, 8, 0 );
     }
    

    You can see that we will draw the circle(s) on red and the center(s) with a small green dot

  6. Display the detected circle(s):

    namedWindow( "Hough Circle Transform Demo", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE );
    imshow( "Hough Circle Transform Demo", src );
    
  7. Wait for the user to exit the program

    waitKey(0);
    

Result

The result of running the code above with a test image is shown below:

Result of detecting circles with Hough Transform