Object detecting apparatus in which the position of a planar object is estimated by using hough transform

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Listed from its EPO record in Patent Yard's archive of European patents past their term. Its claims, description and drawings are in the EPO PDF and on Google Patents, and the Claude kit works from them.

Why it's free to use

• Filed September 2, 1996 and granted December 18, 2002. A European patent lasts at most 20 years from filing, so its term ended September 2, 2016.
• A supplementary protection certificate, which can extend a medicine or crop-protection patent, adds at most five and a half years, so even that would have ended by March 2, 2022.
• We check European rights only. A US or other national patent in its family could still be in force: check its family on Espacenet or Google Patents.