Detection Of The Vanishing Line Of The Ocean Surface From Pairs Of Scale-Invariant Keypoints

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for estimating the vanishing line of a stochastically-textured plane in a single image taken by an uncalibrated perspective camera. As an example of such type of texture we take images of ocean surface for which existing methods of vanishing line detection from texture perform poorly. The proposed algorithm relies on finding pairs of similarly looking scale-invariant keypoints that are different in scale. The location of the vanishing line is estimated directly from those pairs of points by finding the vanishing line that represents the consensus of individually found vanishing points. We demonstrate the potential of the proposed method on a number of real images of ocean surface by estimating the horizon line using SIFT keypoints.