A novel automatic Vickers hardness measuring method is proposed. An algorithm called Hough fuzzy vertices detection algorithm (HFVDA) is proposed. In order to overcome the unavoidable affects of vertex detection due to surface contaminations or specimen texture, HFVDA transforms all the candidate pixels on the indentation edge lines into Hough space. Within Hough space, a weighted fuzzy c-means algorithm along with local maximum detection is proposed to find the transformed indentation edge lines. It will be shown that HFVDA is able to find the indentation vertices and calculate the hardness number with high accuracy for either specular-polished or rough-polished specimens.