An unsupervised generalized Hough transform for natural shapes

The Hough transform was originally designed to recognize artifical objects in images. A Hough transform for natural shapes (HTNS) was subsequently proposed, but necessitates the supervised learning of the class of shapes. Here, we extend HTNS to unsupervised pattern recognition, the variability of the object class being coded with tools originating from mathematical morphology (erosion, dilation and distance functions).