The chain codes based edge tracking and Hough transform which are the traditional methods for the line detection are sensitive to the noise and hard to satisfy the real time applications. This paper propose a novel method that combines improved chain codes based edge tracking (ICCBET) with improved Hough transform (IHT) to successfully detect the airport runway in real time. ICCBET primarily removes the short and curving lines to reduce the pixels and confirms the approximate orientation to shorten the angle range IHT processes in later. Furthermore

through using pyramid during HT stage

the computation cost is reduced considerably. Finally

we fix the memory by designing a chain list array for the image to avoid overflow arise from building chain list with memory dynamic allocation. Now

the algorithm is applied in the TMS320C6416 hardware system. The experiments on various images show that our method satisfies the real time need with about29 multiples computation reduction contrast to the original Hough transform and overcomes the blur and occlusion to localize the lines with high accuracy contrast to the original chain codes based edge tracking.