The 3-Point Method: A Fast, Accurate and Robust Solution to Vanishing Point Estimation

Vanishing points can provide information about the 3D world and hence are of great interest for machine vision applications. In this paper, we present a single point perspectivity based method for robust and accurate estimation of Vanishing Points (VPs). It utilizes location of 3 collinear points in image space and their distance ratio in the world frame for VP estimation. We present an algebraic derivation for the proposed 3-Point (3-P) method. It provides us a non-iterative, closed-form solution. The 3-P results are compared with ground truth of VP and it is shown to be accurate. Its robustness to point selection and image noise is proved through extensive simulations. Computational time requirement for 3-P method is shown to be much less than least squares based method. The 3-P method is extremely useful for accurate VP estimation in structured and well-defined environments.