Use of Motion Statistics for Vanishing Point Estimation in Camera-Mirror Scenes

In this paper we address the problem of estimating the position of the vanishing point in an outdoor camera-mirror environment, making use of motion statistics derived from a video sequence. Knowledge of the vanishing-point position is the key for the geometrical modeling of reflective surfaces or cast shadows; this allows the (future) integration of the model into foreground-extraction methods to achieve better performance. Thanks to the use of co-motion statistics in the correspondence-detection step, our approach gives robust results. The presented optimization method for final parameter estimation utilizes motion statistics to determine an improved fitting function in case of wide-baseline views and in cases where the correspondences are corrupted with considerable amounts of noise. Results are presented for several video sequences representing a variety of scene layouts and object types. The outcomes show that our approach gives robust results in the context of widely different environments.