LineFit: A Geometric Approach for Fitting Line Segments in Images

We present LineFit, an algorithm that fits line segments from a predicted image gradient map. While existing detectors aim at capturing line segments on line-like structures, our algorithm also seeks to approximate curved shapes. This particularity is interesting for addressing vectorization problems with edge-based representations, after connecting the detected line segments. Our algorithm measures and optimizes the quality of a line segment configuration globally as a point-to-line fitting problem. The quality of configurations is measured through the local fitting error, the completeness over the image gradient map and the capacity to preserve geometric regularities. A key ingredient of our work is an efficient and scalable exploration mechanism that refines an initial configuration by ordered sequences of geometric operations. We show the potential of our algorithm when combined with recent deep image gradient predictions and its competitiveness against existing detectors on different datasets, especially when scenes contain curved objects. We also demonstrate the benefit of our algorithm for polygonalizing objects.