Geometry of vanishing points and its application to external calibration and realtime pose estimation,” Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Report UCB-ITS-RR-2006-5

Vanishing points of an image contain important information for camera cal-ibration. Various calibration techniques have been introduced using the prop-erties of vanishing points to find intrinsic and extrinsic calibration parameters. This paper revisits the vanishing points geometry and suggests a simple extrinsic parameter estimation algorithm which uses a single rectangle. The comparison with the Camera Calibration Toolbox for Matlab shows that the proposed al-gorithm is highly competitive. The suggested technique is also applied to a realtime pose estimation for an unmanned air vehicle’s navigation in an urban environment. We present a realtime vanishing point extraction algorithm and a pose estimation procedure. The experimental result on a real flight video clip is presented