Automatic facades segmentation using detected lines and vanishing points

Segmenting facades from buildings is important to a variety of vision applications operating in outdoor urban environments which include image-based modeling, landmark recognition, autonomous navigation and urban scene understanding. Existing method based on Structure-from-Motion relies on multiple images, and the cost of computation is high, while another method based on prior knowledge about arbitrarily shaped repetitive regions cannot handle non-repetitive facades segmentation. In order to segment facades simply, fast and accurately, we propose an automatic algorithm for facade segmentation, which segments building to a set of separate facades. By first detecting line segments and corresponding vanishing points from a single image, then rectifying the image to make the vertical direction be parallel to y-direction of the image, we convert the facade-segmentation problem to a simple 1D segmentation. The experiment results show that our method is accurate, robust and efficient to facades segmentation problem.