A straight-line-based vanishing point detection method for railway environmental images

In this paper, we present a method of estimating the vanishing point from the railway environment images. Vanishing point plays a very important role in the machine vision based railway-environment surveillance methods, e.g. estimating the pose of the camera, video segmentation and panorama. In the application of railway-environment surveillance, we most care about the vanishing point corresponding to the lines parallel to the rails. Based on the prior, we design a fast and effective method-Selected Line Segment Detector (SLSD) to detect the line segments corresponding to the scene-lines parallel to the rails, and then use a cross-iteration method to find the vanishing point in the railway environment images. We give both theoretical analysis and algorithm implementation. Our experimental results show the validation of the proposed method.