Distance measurement in panoramic video

Abstract

Computing world distances of scene features from the captured images is a common task in image analysis and scene understanding. Projective geometry based methods focus on measuring distance from one single image, the scope of measurable scene is limited by the field-of-view (FOV) of one single camera. With a full view panorama, the scope of measurable scene is no longer limited by FOV. However, the scope of measurable scene is limited by the fixed capture location of a single panorama. In this paper, we propose one method of measuring distances of line segments in real world scene using panoramic video representation. The scope of measurable scene is largely extended without the limitation of FOV and a fixed capture location. A prototype system called PVMeasure is developed to allow user to interactively measure the distances of line segments in a panoramic video. Experiment results verify that the method offers good accuracy.