The Hough transform is a feature extraction technique used in image analysis and computer vision to detect shapes within images. It works by detecting imperfect instances of objects of a certain class of shapes via a voting procedure. Specifically, the Hough transform can be used to detect lines, circles, and other shapes in an image if their parametric equations are known, and it provides robust detection even under noise and partial occlusion. It works by quantizing the parameter space that describes the shape and counting the number of votes each parametric description receives from edge points in the image.