Detecting Coins using Hough Tramsform

Vivek Kwatra









The problem was to detect coins in an image using edge detection and Hough Transform.
The technique was implemented in MATLAB. This page contains a description of the technique and images showing results.
I did the detection on the image coins2.jpg - the image with coins on a texture.

The function coin_detect is called with the filename of the image to detect the coins. It does the following -

1. Doing Edge detection on the image - I used the Canny edge detector with 0.1 and 0.45 as the low and high thresholds. This removed most of the noise due to the texture leaving only the edges of the coins and due to the texture within the coins.

2. Hough Transform computation - I first computed the radii of the coins present in the image. The penny had a radius of 27 pixels and the quarter had a radius of 34.5 pixels. The radius was pretty consistent among the various coins. I then filled the accumulator array corresponding to each of the above radii, where each array composed of cells for the (x,y) coordinates of the center of the potential circle (boundary of the coin). The default size of the cells was chosen to be 4x4 pixels. To function hough_circle computes the transform. For each edge pixel, it first runs through a sequence of x-values and computes the corresponding y-values for that radius.It then runs through a sequence of y-values and computes the corresponding x-values for that radius. The sequence of x-values varies from x(edge-pixel) -( radius/cos(45))  to  x(edge-pixel) + (radius/cos(45)). The same is true for the sequence of y-values. The two sequences are so processed because as the points reach the x (y)-axis, we get the same y(x)-value for different x(y)-values, for points lying on the circle corresponding to the hough transform. This choice of sequences does not lets any bias to be introduced because of choice of an x or a y sequence.

3. Detecting circles - Once the hough transform image for a particular radius is computed, it is adjusted to lie between 0 and 1 and thresholded, so as to leave only those points with high probability of being the centers. The function mark_circles does this with a value of 0.67. The resulting point-sets are then labeled with different regions. The centroids of each region are considered as centers of the detected coins. The output image is computed by drawing circles with these points as centers and the matched radius as the radius, and adding this to the input image.
 

Discussion -  The technique works pretty well with this image. The computational complexity highly depends on the number of edge pixles and the number of radii to be matched. In this case the number of radii is pretty less. For the image considered, the edge pixels are also less because the texture does not introduce strong edges. For the second image it would be harder because the background introduces a lot of edges, increasing the number of edge pixels tremendously. Also it can falsely detect circles with similar radii if even if they are not coins.
 

coin_detect.m
hough_circle.m
mark_circles.m
fastsearch.m
draw_circle.m
 



Original Image
 
 
 


Edge Image
 
 


Hough Transform : Left for Penny, Right for Quarters
 
 
 


Detected Coins