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

Abstract

This paper describes a new method for recovering the perspective geometry of textured planes from local spectral analysis. The novel contribution of the 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 process. It commences by computing the Fourier power spectrum at each of a series of local neighbourhoods and identifying contours which connect the local spectral moments of equal power. As noted by Sevens (1981), these contours are perpendicular to the tilt direction. The second step is to triangulate the vanishing point. We do this by using a correlation method to identify 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.