Single view based measurement on space planes

The plane metrology using a single uncalibrated image is studied in the paper, and three novel approaches are proposed. The first approach, namely key-line-based method, is an improvement over the widely used key-point-based method, which uses line correspondences directly to compute homography between the world plane and its image so as to increase the computational accuracy. The second and third approaches are both based on a pair of vanishing points from two orthogonal sets of parallel lines in the space plane together with two unparallel referential distances, but the two methods deal with the problem in different ways. One is from the algebraic viewpoint which first maps the image points to an affine space via a transformation constructed from the vanishing points, and then computes the metric distance according to the relationship between the affine space and the Euclidean space, while the other is from the geometrical viewpoint based on the invariance of cross ratios. The second and third methods avoid the selection of control points and are widely applicable. In addition, a brief description on how to retrieve other geometrical entities on the space plane, such as distance from a point to a line, angle formed by two lines, etc., is also presented in the paper. Extensive experiments on simulated data as well as on real images show that the first and the second approaches are of better precision and stronger robustness than the key-point-based one and the third one, since these two approaches are fundamentally based on line information.