Functional vanishing point estimation via a filtered-Radon operator

When available, vanishing points in a scene are a key factor in effectively recovering absolute camera orientation, thus simplifying the structure-from-motion problem. We present a novel method for estimating vanishing points without explicitly detecting line features. This approach first maps images into line-space with a filtered- Radon operator, allowing subtle line textures to contribute, and improving the angular resolution of broken or occluded segments of the same line. Then, we use a robust coarse-to-fine method to jointly estimate the three vanishing points. We evaluate our method on video sequences, demonstrating robustness to clutter lines as well as the ability to effectively utilize subtle edge-texture information.