Automatic Approach for Rectifying Building Facades from a Single Uncalibrated Image

Abstract

We describe a robust method for automatically rectifying the main facades of buildings from single images taken from short to medium distances. This utility is an important step in building recognition, photogrammetry and other 3D reconstruction applications. Our main contribution lies in a refinement technique for vanishing point estimation and building line grouping, since both significantly affect the location and warping of building facades. The method has been shown to work successfully on 96 of images from the Zubud-Zurich building database where images frequently contain occlusions, different illumination conditions and wide variations in viewpoint.