The CMU Robotics Institute has posted an interesting doctoral dissertation by Derek Hoiem titled, Seeing the World Behind the Image: Spatial Layout for 3D Scene Understanding (PDF format). The abstract says, "When humans look at an image, they see not just a pattern of color and texture, but the world behind the image. In the same way, computer vision algorithms must go beyond the pixels and reason about the underlying scene. In this dissertation, we propose methods to recover the basic spatial layout from a single image and begin to investigate its use as a foundation for scene understanding." You can read more about these methods on the Geometrically Coherent Image Interpretation website. See also our story last year on earlier results from this project.