Circle detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision. However, conventional circle detection algorithms are usually time-consuming and sensitive to noise. In order to solve these shortcomings, we propose a fast circle detection algorithm based on information compression. First, we introduce the idea of information compression, which compresses the circular information on the image into a small number of points while removing some of the noise through sharpness estimation and orientation filtering. Then, the circle parameters stored in the information point are obtained by the average sampling algorithm with a time complexity of O(1) to obtain candidate circles. Finally, we set different constraints on the complete circle and the defective circle according to the sampling results and find the true circle from the candidate circles. The experimental results on the three datasets show that our method can compress the circular information in the image into 1% of the information points, and compared to RHT, RCD, Jiang, Wang and CACD, Precision, Recall, Time and F-measure are greatly improved.
Keywords: average sampling verification; circle detection; information compression.