Multi-sector algorithm for hardware acceleration of the general Hough transform

The Multi-Sector Algorithm (MSA) is a simplification of the CORDIC algorithm to more closely meet the requirements for real-time general Hough transform applications. The MSA can form a pipeline, and multiple angle rotations are performed in parallel. The whole has been tested on Virtex platform FPGAs to find straight edges within images. Angular resolution is incrementally scalable. Video-rate processing is easily achieved. The ability to run independent MS units in parallel is only limited by on-chip memory restrictions.