Optimized Clustering Scheme-Based Robust Vanishing Point Detection

Robust vanishing point estimation has been widely applied to various applications in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition for robotics, advanced driver assistance systems, and autonomous driving vehicles. The major challenge for vanishing point detection lies in line segments, spurious vanishing candidate removal, and clustering for refinement. Recent vanishing point detection approaches have attempted to reduce the computational complexity involved with voting processes using optimized voter selection strategies to identify the vanishing point from line segments. This paper proposes a novel vanishing point detection method to select robust candidates, applying optimized minimum spanning tree-based clustering of the vanishing point candidates by analyzing the lines within a unit sphere domain. The proposed scheme was applied to an open database that included illumination, partial occlusion, and viewpoint changes to validate robustness without prior scene information.