Plane rectification through robust vanishing point tracking using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm

This paper introduces a new strategy for plane rectification in sequences of images, based on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Our approach is able to compute simultaneously the parameters of the dominant vanishing point in the image plane and the most significant lines passing through it. It is based on a novel definition of the likelihood distribution of the gradient image considering both the position and the orientation of the gradient pixels. Besides, the mixture model in which the EM algorithm operates is extended, compared to other works, to consider an additional component to control the presence of outliers. Some synthetic data tests are described to show the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method. The plane rectification results show that the method is able to remove the perspective and affine distortion of real traffic sequences without the need to compute two vanishing points.