Stereo: Photo-metrology
Aims: Easy to use software and versatile methods of digitizing 3D objects.What is it?
Stereo is software that allows the user to obtain dimensional data of 3D objects or surfaces within stereo photographs or images.
The user can take a number of photos of items of interest, from arbitrary camera positions. The photos can be loaded into Stereo, and calibrated using known x,y,z coordinates of a few points within the photos.
Once calibrated, Stereo knows the camera position for each photo. Points on items of interest can be then be manually located in each photo of a pair and surface data generated. It should be possible to describe a 3D object by taking many overlapping photos and using generated data in a previous pair to calibrate the next pair, and so on.
The surface model shown in the screenshot can be rotated about all axes using the mouse. Scaling, and various shading options are available via the graphics window buttons.
Background
Stereo was developed by Paul Sheer in 1996-97 as part of his MSc thesis, and was designed to provide an improved method of digitizing (generating x,y,z data) items of interest to assist CAD. Development of the software ceased when Paul completed his MSc.News
The task of revising/updating the existing the code set is a huge
task, and the aim is now to develop a new modular version using a gui
frontend and a number of backend solvers.
Test code for a new backend utilising a Direct Linear Transform (DLT)
approach to camera calibration is in the DLT branch of the SVN repository.
10 Jul 2009
A tutorial has been prepared which shows the basics of generating surface data from an image pair. Aug 1 2008
Version 0.2b-1 is now available for download. This includes a fix to a problem which occured when trying to load a calibration file. Apologies, the fix was thought to be included in the 0.2b release. July 31 2008.
The current version, 0.2b, (original release by Paul Sheer), is stable and now available for download. July 25 2008
Examples
Some more screenshots are available which show other aspects of Stereo
Tutorials
A number of online tutorials describing the use of Stereo are being prepared.
To Do
Help is needed with the development, particularly with a frontend to collect data points and drive the backend solver. Some initial thoughts on what is needed.
This page prepared by Terry Duell July 2009