A New Approach for Vanishing Point Detection in Architectural Environments

A man-made environment is characterized by a lot of parallel lines and a lot of orthogonal edges. In this article, a new method for detecting the three mutual orthogonal directions of such an environment is presented. Since realtime performance is not necessary for architectural application, like building reconstruction, a computationally more intensive approach was chosen. On the other hand, our approach is more rigorous than existing techniques, since the information given by the condition of three mutual orthogonal directions in the scene is identified and incorporated. Since knowledge about the camera geometry can be deduced from the vanishing points of three mutual orthogonal directions, we use this knowledge to reject falsely detected vanishing points. Results are presented from interpreting outdoor scenes of buildings.