Perspective is a fundamental structure that is found to some extent in most images that reflect 3D structure. It is thought to be an important factor in the human visual system for obtaining understanding and extracting semantics from visual material. This paper describes a method of detecting vanishing points in images that does not require prior assumptions about the image being analysed. It enables 3D information to be inferred from 2D images. The approach is derived from earlier work on visual attention that identifies salient regions and translational symmetries.