A surface with stratified functional properties (hereafter, referred to as the “plateau surface”) improves the tribological characteristics of sliding surfaces in machine tools, automobile parts, engines, etc. The evaluation methods of the plateau surface are listed in the ISO 13565 standard. However, since the evaluation methods listed in ISO 13565-3 are associated with several problems, these evaluation methods have been rarely used in production management. A plateau surface evaluation method that applied image recognition technology was developed in previous research studies to solve these problems. However, this method is time consuming with a calculation time of approximately 20 s. Therefore, in this research, we developed a new plateau surface evaluation method that applied the fast M-estimation type Hough transformation to achieve a computational time of a few seconds. It is expected that this method will be used in mass production processes.

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