For increasing the utility rate of the log material, it is very important to obtain the maximum cylinder cut from round logs. The cross-section of a log can be viewed as a quasi-circle. In this paper, three novel methods for finding the maximum circle in a single quasi-circle closed profile are proposed and their performance is compared with that of using the local search (LS). In order to evaluate the ability of these algorithms, the profiles with 70% quasi-circle rate are adopted to simulate real log materials. It appears that both the tabu search (TS) and the Hooke search methods (HS) demonstrate superior performances than local search and genetic algorithm (GA). With the multiple circles acquired from two quasi-circle profiles of the actual log, the maximum circle can be obtained inside the overlapped area.