Estimating the 3D orientation of texture planes using local spectral analysis

This paper describes a new method for recovering the perspective geometry o f textured planes from local spectral analysis. The novel contribution of t he work is to use the angular distribution of texture moments to locate the vanishing point of textured planes viewed under perspective geometry. Our key observation is that lines of uniform spectral orientation radiate from the vanishing point. We exploit this property to develop a simple algorithm for estimating the slant and tilt of textured planes. This is a two-step p rocess. It commences by computing the Fourier power spectrum at each of a s eries of local neighbourhoods and identifying contours which connect the lo cal spectral moments of equal power. As noted by Sevens (1981), these conto urs are perpendicular to the tilt direction. The second step is to triangul ate the vanishing point. We do this by using a correlation method to identi fy lines of uniform spectral orientation that originate from the vanishing point. This second property represents the novel contribution of the paper. We evaluate the new algorithm on both synthetic imagery with known ground- truth and on real-world data. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights res erved.