A Vanishing Point Detection Method Based on the Empirical Weighting of the Lines of Artificial Structures

Hang-Tae Kim, Wonseok Song, Hyuk Choi, Taejeong Kim

http://doi.org/

A vanishing point is a point where parallel lines converge, and they become evident when a camera’s lenses are used to project 3D space onto a 2D image plane. Vanishing point detection is the use of the information contained within an image to detect the vanishing point, and can be utilized to infer the relative distance between certain points in the image or for understanding the geometry of a 3D scene. Since parallel lines generally exist for the artificial structures within images, line-detection-based vanishing point-detection techniques aim to find the point where the parallel lines of artificial structures converge. To detect parallel lines in an image, we detect edge pixels through edge detection and then find the lines by using the Hough transform. However, the various textures and noise in an image can hamper the line-detection process so that not all of the lines converging toward the vanishing point are obvious. To overcome this difficulty, it is necessary to assign a different weight to each line according to the degree of possibility that the line passes through the vanishing point. While previous research studies assigned equal weight or adopted a simple weighting calculation, in this paper, we are proposing a new method of assigning weights to lines after noticing that the lines that pass through vanishing points typically belong to artificial structures. Experimental results show that our proposed method reduces the vanishing point-estimation error rate by 65% when compared to existing methods.