The damage or loss of urban road manhole covers may cause great risk to residents＇ lives and property if they cannot be discovered in time. Most existing research recommendations for solving this problem are difficult to implement. This paper proposes an algorithm that combines the improved Hough transform and image comparison to identify the damage or loss of the manhole covers in complicated surface conditions by using existing urban road video images. Focusing on the pre-processed images, the edge contour tracking algorithm is applied to find all of the edges. Then with the improved Hough transformation, color recognition and image matching algorithm, the manhole cover area is found and the change rates of the manhole cover area are calculated. Based on the threshold of the change rates, it can be determined whether there is potential damage or loss in the manhole cover. Compared with the traditional Hough transform, the proposed method can effectively improve the processing speed and reduce invalid sampling and accumulation. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm has the functions of effective positioning and early warning in the conditions of complex background, different perspectives, and different videoing time and conditions, such as when the target is partially covered.
