The authors describe a new algorithm for the fast Hough transform (FHT) that satisfactorily solves the problems other fast algorithms propose in the literature-erroneous solutions, point redundance, scaling, and detection of straight lines of different sizes-and needs less storage space. By using the information generated by the algorithm for the detection of straight lines, they manage to detect the segments of the image without appreciable computational overhead. They also discuss the performance and the parallelization of the algorithm and show its efficiency with some examples.