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The Hough transform is a standard pattern recognition technique introduced between the 1960s and the 1970s for the detection of straight lines, circles, and ellipses with several applications including the detection of symmetries in images. Recently, based on algebraic geometry arguments, the procedure has been extended to the automated recognition of special classes of algebraic plane curves. This allows us to detect curves of symmetry present in images, that is, curves that recognize midpoints maps of various shapes extracted by an ad hoc symmetry algorithm, here proposed. Further, in the case of straight lines, the detection of lines of symmetry allows us, by a pre-processing step of the image, to improve the efficiency of the recognition algorithm on which the Hough transform technique is founded, without loss of generality and additional computational costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]