The quality of cameras is currently increasing very fast meanwhile the price of them is decreasing. The possibilities of using a camera as a measurement and navigation instrument are thus getting bigger all the time.
This thesis studies the transformation relations between a camera image and the scene in space that is projected to it. A theoretical derivation of the transform will be presented, and methods and algorithms for applications based on the transform will be developed.
The above mentioned transform is called the camera matrix, which contains information about the camera attitude, the camera position, and the internal structure of the camera. Useful information for several different applications can be extracted from the camera image with the help of the camera matrix.
In one of the applications, treated in this thesis, the camera attitude is estimated when the camera is calibrated and its position is known. Another application is that of absolute target positioning, where a point in a digital map is searched from its position in a camera image.
Better accuracy in the measurements can though be obtained with relative target positioning i.e., estimation of distance and angle between two points in the digital map by picking them out in the image. This is because that the errors of the absolute target positioning for each of the two points are dependent and thus partly will cancel each other out when their relative position and angle is measured.
Source: Linköping University
Author: Börjesson, Nils