A method for machine-readable zones location based on a combination of the Hough transform and the search for feature points

This article describes a method for machine-readable zones location in document images based on a combination of the Hough transform and the search for feature points. The search for feature points, filtering, and clustering using the Hough transform are described step-by-step. In addition to the machine-readable zone location, we develop a solution for determining the orientation of the zone. This method is designed to meet the requirements for real-time operation on mobile devices. The paper presents the results of measuring the quality of the method on an open synthetic dataset and the operating time on mobile devices. An experimental study on an artificial dataset show that the proposed algorithm allows to achieve a quality of 0,82 in terms of the mean value of the Jaccard indices. The operating time of the proposed algorithm for machine-readable zone location on a mobile device is 6 ms on the iPhone SE 2.