Detecting planar surfaces in outdoor urban environments /

We describe an approach to automatically detect building facades in images of urban environments. This is an important problem in vision-based navigation, landmark recognition, and surveillance applications. In particular, with the proliferation of GPS- and camera-enabled cell phones, a backup geolo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author:	David, Philip
Corporate Author:	U.S. Army Research Laboratory
Format:	Government Document eBook
Language:	English
Published:	Adelphi, MD : Army Research Laboratory, [2008]
Series:	ARL-TR (Aberdeen Proving Ground) ; 4599.
Subjects:	Echo-planar imaging. Facades. Urban warfare. Cybernetics. Structural engineering and building technology. Image processing. Buildings. Planar structures. Computer vision. Recognition. Urban areas. Two dimensional. Surfaces. BUILDING FACADES PLANAR SURFACES VANISHING POINT LINE SEGMENTS
Online Access:	http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA488059 https://purl.fdlp.gov/GPO/LPS117116

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Summary:	We describe an approach to automatically detect building facades in images of urban environments. This is an important problem in vision-based navigation, landmark recognition, and surveillance applications. In particular, with the proliferation of GPS- and camera-enabled cell phones, a backup geolocation system is needed when GPS satellite signals are blocked in so-called "urban canyons." Image line segments are first located, and then the vanishing points of these segments are determined using the RANSAC robust estimation algorithm. Next, the intersections of line segments associated with pairs of vanishing points are used to generate local support for planar facades at different orientations. The plane support points are then clustered using an algorithm that requires no knowledge of the number of clusters or of their spatial proximity. Finally, building facades are identified by fitting vanishing point-aligned quadrilaterals to the clustered support points. Our experiments show good performance in a number of complex urban environments. The main contribution of our approach is its improved performance over existing approaches while placing no constraints on the facades in terms of their number or orientation, and minimal constraints on the length of the detected line segments.
Item Description:	Title from PDF title screen (viewed on Dec. 2, 2009). "September 2008." Tilte from PDF title screen (viewed on Dec. 2, 2009). Electronic resource.
Physical Description:	1 online resource (iv, 19 pages) : illustrations (chiefly color).
Bibliography:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 16-18).
Access:	APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE.