Joint Vanishing Point Extraction and Tracking

Till Kroeger, Dengxin Dai, Luc Van Gool; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015, pp. 2449-2457

We present a novel vanishing point (VP) detection and tracking algorithm for calibrated monocular image sequences. Previous VP detection and tracking methods usually assume known camera poses for all frames or detect and track separately. We advance the state-of-the-art by combining VP extraction on a Gaussian sphere with recent advances in multi-target tracking on probabilistic occupancy fields. The solution is obtained by solving a Linear Program (LP). This enables the joint detection and tracking of multiple VPs over sequences. Unlike existing works we do not need known camera poses, and at the same time avoid detecting and tracking in separate steps. We also propose an extension to enforce VP orthogonality. We augment an existing video dataset consisting of 48 monocular videos with multiple annotated VPs in 14448 frames for evaluation. Although the method is designed for unknown camera poses, it is also helpful in scenarios with known poses, since a multi-frame approach in VP detection helps to regularize in frames with weak VP line support.