Camera calibration and geo-location estimation from two shadow trajectories

    Authors

    L. Wu; X. C. Cao;H. Foroosh

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    Comput. Vis. Image Underst.

    Keywords

    Geographical location; Metric rectification; Shadow trajectory; Analemmatic sundial; CAST SHADOWS; OBJECTS; VIEW; RECONSTRUCTION; ILLUMINATION; SEGMENTATION; REVOLUTION; SURFACES; Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence; Engineering, Electrical &; Electronic

    Abstract

    The position of a world point's solar shadow depends on its geographical location, the geometrical relationship between the orientation of the sunshine and the ground plane where the shadow casts. This paper investigates the property of solar shadow trajectories on a planar surface and shows that camera parameters, latitude, longitude and shadow casting objects' relative height ratios can be estimated from two observed shadow trajectories. One contribution is to recover the horizon line and metric rectification matrix from four observations of two shadow tips. The other contribution is that we use the design of an analemmatic sundial to get the shadow conic and furthermore recover the camera's geographical location. The proposed method does not require the shadow casting objects or a vertical object to be visible in the recovery of camera calibration. This approach is thoroughly validated on both synthetic and real data, and tested against various sources of errors including noise, number of observations, objects locations, and camera orientations. We also present applications to image-based metrology. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

    Journal Title

    Computer Vision and Image Understanding

    Volume

    114

    Issue/Number

    8

    Publication Date

    1-1-2010

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    915

    Last Page

    927

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000280543700006

    ISSN

    1077-3142

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