Photogrammetric methods for calculating the dimensions of cuboids from images

Abstract: There are situations where you would like to know the size of an object but do not have a ruler nearby. However, it is likely that you are carrying a smartphone that has an integrated digital camera, so imagine if you could snap a photo of the object to get a size estimation. Different methods for finding the dimensions of a cuboid from a photography are evaluated in this project. A simple Android application implementing these methods has also been created. To be able to perform measurements of objects in images we need to know how the scene is reproduced by the camera. This depends on the traits of the camera, called the intrinsic parameters. These parameters are unknown unless a camera calibration is performed, which is a non-trivial task. Because of this eight smartphone cameras, of different models, were calibrated in search of similarities that could give ground for generalisations. To be able to determine the size of the cuboid the scale needs to be known, which is why a reference object is used. In this project a credit card is used as reference, which is placed on top of the cuboid. The four corners of the reference as well as four corners of the cuboid are used to determine the dimensions of the cuboid. Two methods, one dependent and one independent of the intrinsic parameters, are used to find the width and length, i.e. the sizes of the two dimensions that share a plane with the reference. These results are then used in another two methods to find the height of the cuboid. Errors were purposely introduced to the corners to investigate the performance of the different methods. The results show that the different methods perform very well and are all equally suitable for this type of problem. They also show that having correct reference corners is more important than having correct object corners as the results were highly dependent on the accuracy of the reference corners. Another conclusion is that the camera calibration is not necessary because different approximations of the intrinsic parameters can be used instead.