AN APPROXIMATE MAXIMUM-LIKELIHOOD LINEAR ESTIMATOR OF CIRCLE PARAMETERS

The problem of estimating the center and radius of a circle from a giv en set of noisy coordinate measurements has many applications. Even th ough the estimation process is inherently nonlinear, it is possible to obtain linear estimators, which are attractive because of their simpl icity. This paper presents an approximate maximum likelihood estimator of circle parameters. It is linear. Simulation results showed that un der conditions of small are length and high noise, which occur often i n practice, the new estimator outperforms the linear estimator of S. T homas and Y. T. Chan (Comput. Vision Graph. Image Process. 45 (1989), 362-370). (C) 1997 Academic Press.