3D shape reconstruction by using vanishing points

This paper investigates the quantitative reconstruction of the 3D structure of a scene from a line drawing, by using the geometrical constraints provided by the location of vanishing points. The additional information on vanishing points allows the design of an algorithm which has several advantages with respect to the usual approach based on a reduction to linear programming (Sugihara, 1982). These advantages range from a lower computational complexity to error tolerance and exact reconstruction of the 3D-geometry of the objects. These features make the algorithm a useful tool for the quantitative analysis of real-world images, which is useful for several tasks from scene understanding to automatic vehicle guidance.