Estimation of the vanishing point in camera-mirror scenes from video

Knowledge of the position of the vanishing point is the key for geometrical modeling of an image containing a reflective surface or cast shadows. Such an image can be analyzed as two subimages that constitute a stereo pair. For this model-estimation task an automatic method is presented that utilizes motion statistics and the statistical properties of image points for the determination of point correspondence and the subsequent estimation of vanishing point position, optimized by use of a goodness-of-fit function. We show that this approach gives robust results in widely different real-world environments, even when the correspondence is corrupted with considerable amounts of noise.