In various examples, locations of directional landmarks, such as vertical landmarks, may be identified using 3D reconstruction. A set of observations of directional landmarks (e.g., images captured from a moving vehicle) may be reduced to 1D lookups by rectifying the observations to align directional landmarks along a particular direction of the observations. Object detection may be applied, and corresponding 1D lookups may be generated to represent the presence of a detected vertical landmark in an image.