Robust online estimation of the vanishing point for vehicle mounted cameras

For cameras mounted on a vehicle, the estimation of the vanishing point corresponding to the observed field of view is an important machine vision task necessary for a lot of applications, such as camera calibration and autonomous vehicle navigation. In this paper, a novel method for the estimation of the vanishing point corresponding to a particular camera orientation with respect to the vehicle is proposed. Robust features are first extracted and the motion of the vehicle is then used to estimate parallel trajectories by tracking these features. Thus, the proposed scheme does not rely on any man-made structures or pre-assumed gradients. The estimated trajectories are then processed to robustly estimate the vanishing point for the mounted camera for any given driving direction. Experimental results show that the proposed technique is able to robustly and accurately estimate the vanishing point for a variety of orientations of the camera mounting.