Efficient height measurements in single images based on the detection of vanishing points

Surveillance cameras have become a customary security equipment in buildings and streets worldwide. It is up to thefieldof Computational Forensics toprovide automatedmethods for extracting andanalyzing relevant image data captured by such equipment. In this article, we describe an effective and semi-automatedmethod for detecting vanishing points, with their subsequent application to the problem of computing heights in single images. With no necessary camera calibration, our method iteratively clusters segments in the bidimensional projective space, identifying all vanishing points – finite and infinite – in an image. We conduct experiments on images of man-made environments to evaluate the output of the proposed method and we also consider its application on a photogrammetry framework. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.