Fast and accurate vanishing point estimation on structured roads

We propose a method for estimating the vanishing point of structured roads directly in the image plane using the parallel nature of road markings as well as intelligent preprocessing and data reduction steps. The resulting vanishing point enables estimating the image to world projection, which then is used to perform subsequent tasks such as object detection. The major advantages of the proposed method are modest computational requirements as well as independence of the used camera model and without a calibration phase.