Ellipse Detection

[bronxbomber92]

We've been experiencing pretty awful drops in performance (being able to procress approximately 4 images per second) in trying to the detect the target. I've narrowed down the performance bottleneck to the imaqDetectEllipses function (it accounts for approximately 80% of the performance hit). Has anyone else been having similar experiences? If so, what have you done/tried to allieviate the problem? I've looked at increasing the row and column step sizes of the CurveOptions object passed to imaqDetectEllipses, but I'm afraid that increasing this too much (ie, pass 20) will lead to a lot of missed ellipses at further distances (though I don't have any data to back this up due to an inadequate testing environment). I'm fearful I'm going to have to look into implementing our own ellipse detection code. On that note, have you guys looked at doing the same, and do you have any clue to how the imaqDetectEllipses function works under the hood (so, perhaps, I can avoid duplicating their implementation)?

I've been looking at using the hough transform to detect ellipses, but there isn't a whole lot of info out there on implementations details. I've been looking at OpenCV's HoughCircle function, and I can't imagine it being very fast either (though, I could be wrong..).