The widespread use of vision-based surveillance systems has inspired many research efforts on people localization. In this paper, a series of novel image transforms based on the vanishing point of vertical lines is proposed for enhancement of the probabilistic occupancy map (POM)-based people localization scheme. Utilizing the characteristic that the extensions of vertical lines intersect at a vanishing point, the proposed transforms, based on image or ground plane coordinate system, aims at producing transformed images wherein each standing/walking person will have an upright appearance. Thus, the degradation in localization accuracy due to the deviation of camera configuration constraint specified can be alleviated, while the computation efficiency resulted from the applicability of integral image can be retained. Experimental results show that significant improvement in POM-based people localization for more general camera configurations can indeed be achieved with the proposed image transforms.