Abstract—Circles detection is an important part of objectrecognition in image processing and computer vision. In thispaper, we propose an adaptive method based on Hough transformto detect the circle shapes in digital image. The Mexican Hatfilter derived from edge filter is used to concentrate the peaksof Hough local maxima. So, the circle center and its radius canbe extracted easily and accurate. The comparison of adaptivemethod and traditional Hough transform will be analyzed.Experimental results over several digital images with varyingranges of complexity showed the efficiency of proposed methodthat more efficient than traditional Hough transform. Finally,The development of circles detection is still needed to get thebest results, especially for circles shape with any noise.Keywords—Hough transform, circle detection, edge detection,local maxima, Sobel filter, Mexican Hat filter.