3D models of architectural scenes from uncalibrated images and vanishing points

We address the problem of recovering 3D models from uncalibrated images of architectural scenes. We propose a simple, geometrically intuitive method which exploits the strong rigidity constraints of parallelism and orthogonality present in indoor and outdoor architectural scenes. We show how these simple constraints can be used to calibrate the cameras and to recover the projection matrices for each viewpoint. The projection matrices are used to recover partial 3D models of the scene and these can be used to visualise new viewpoints. Our approach does not need any a priori information about the cameras being used. A working system called PhotoBuilder has been designed and implemented to allow a user to interactively build a VRML model of a building from uncalibrated images from arbitrary viewpoints.