Improved orientation estimation for texture planes using multiple vanishing points

Abstract

Vanishing point locations play a critical role in determining the perspective pose of textured planes. However, if only a single point is available then the problem is undetermined. The tilt direction must be computed using supplementary information such as the texture gradient. In this paper we describe a method for multiple vanishing point detection and, hence complete perspective pose estimation, which obviates the need to compute the texture gradient. The method is based on local spectral analysis. It exploits the fact that spectral orientation is uniform along lines that radiate from the vanishing point on the image plane. We experiment with the new method on both synthetic and real world imagery. This demonstrates that the method provides accurate pose angle estimates, even when the slant angle is large.