SweepLSD: A One-Pass, O(width)-Memory Line Segment Detector with an Integer-Only Streaming Core and a Real-Time FPGA Realization

Abstract

We present SweepLSD, a line segment detector that reads the image exactly once and emits each segment within a few rows of its last pixel passing the scan line. Every stage, including connected-component labeling and the final line test, processes the image as a row stream: intermediate memory is O(width) rather than O(pixels), and the per-pixel core is integer-only. We give the first complete description of the algorithm, designed in the author's 2014 master's thesis but never published, together with an open-source C++17 implementation and an FPGA realization -- held bit-exact against the software in its hardware configuration -- detecting segments in live 1080p30 video on 2009-era silicon without frame buffer or external memory. On structure-rich public 4K photographs downscaled to Full-HD, one CPU thread detects segments in ~11 ms -- 4.6x/5.2x/25x faster than the original authors' implementations of ELSED, EDLines, and LSD -- with the tightest frame-time distribution and the best per-segment direction accuracy of the four detectors, and curve rejection by design, while trailing ELSED in F-score on synthetic ground truth. A Manhattan-frame vanishing-point study on York Urban and NYU-VP scores every detector under a selection/evaluation-separated best-estimator-per-detector protocol, under which SweepLSD leads on NYU-VP by ~0.3 degrees and trails by 0.1 degrees on York Urban, with the fastest end-to-end pipeline of the four detectors on both. A single-frame camera-attitude application, evaluated on synthetic scenes with exact ground truth and on EuRoC and TUM-VI, matches the baselines' accuracy at a fraction of their memory, and drives a 4K horizon lock to 0.06 degrees median attitude error at 32 ms median per frame.