In this paper, we propose a new method for extracting line segments from edge images. Our method basically follows a line segment grouping approach. This approach has many advantages over a Hough transform based approach in practical situations. However, since the process of the conventional line segment grouping approach is purely local, it does not provide a mechanism for finding more favorable line segments from a global point of view. Our method overcomes the local nature of the conventional line segment grouping approach, while retaining most of its advantages, by incorporating the useful concept of the Hough transform based approach into the line segment grouping approach. Our method is fast and allows elementary line segments to be shared simultaneously by several line segments, and the degree of sharing is determined by a user-specified threshold. We performed a series of tests to compare the performance of our method with that of six other methods. Throughout the tests our method ranked in the top two of the tested methods both in detection rate and computation time.