A survey of Hough Transform

•A survey of Hough Transform (HT) has been done.•The main variants of HT and its formulations have been described.•The hardware and software implementations of HT have been described.•HT has many applications in diverse fields. Out of them some applications in some selected fields have been mentioned.

In 1962 Hough earned the patent for a method [1], popularly called Hough Transform (HT) that efficiently identifies lines in images. It is an important tool even after the golden jubilee year of existence, as evidenced by more than 2500 research papers dealing with its variants, generalizations, properties and applications in diverse fields. The current paper is a survey of HT and its variants, their limitations and the modifications made to overcome them, the implementation issues in software and hardware, and applications in various fields. Our survey, along with more than 200 references, will help the researchers and students to get a comprehensive view on HT and guide them in applying it properly to their problems of interest.