Automatic Single-View Calibration and Rectification from Parallel Planar Curves

Typical methods for camera calibration and image rectification from a single view assume the existence of straight parallel lines from which vanishing points can be computed, or orthogonal structure known to exist in the scene. However, there are practical situations where these assumptions do not apply. Moreover, from a single family of parallel lines on the ground plane there is insufficient information to recover a complete rectification. Here we study a generalization of these methods to scenes known to contain parallel curves. Our method is based on establishing an association between pairs of corresponding points lying on the image projection of these curves. We show how this method can be used to compute a least-squares estimate of the focal length and the camera pose from the tangent lines of the associated points, allowing complete rectification of the image. We evaluate the method on highway and sports track imagery, and demonstrate its accuracy relative to a state-of-the-art vanishing point method.