Single-view metrology

Abstract

The previous chapter has investigated how measurements can be taken on planar surfaces from uncalibrated images. However, the world is not just one big plane (as Cristoforo Colombo discovered five centuries ago); it is a complex three-dimensional structure. Therefore, a more general analysis of the threedimensional scene is required; this is achieved in this chapter. In particular, this chapter describes how aspects of the affine three-dimensional geometry of a scene may be measured from a single perspective image (see also [25, 26, 28]). The techniques described still concentrate on scenes containing planes and parallel lines, although the methods are not so restricted. The algorithms developed here extend and generalize previous results on single-view metrology [59, 68, 96, 100].