Measure Anything with a Camera and Software 208
Kevin C. Tofel writes "Using a simple concept, iPhotoMEASURE software can measure any objects you can take a picture of. Include a printout of a 7.5- or 15-inch square in the photo and the software can measure any distance or object in the pic to within 99.5% accuracy. Although geared towards contractors, there's any number of consumer usage scenarios as well. Enough to justify a $99 price tag? Jury's still out on that."
How Long Before... (Score:1, Interesting)
Never under-price. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's definitely possible to under-price your product if you're not careful. Actually, having a $1299 version might even help drive sales of the $99 version, because people would perceive the $99 version as a sort of 'deal,' as in "hey, for $99 I'm getting 60% of the features of the $1300 version! That's great! I'll take three."
I did something similar once... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was taking a mechanical design class, and I wanted to know the coordinates of a bunch of screwholes in a mounting plate. I looked at it for a second, grinned, and darted to the nearest computer with a scanner -- as my teammates shook their heads (and micrometers) at me, saying "damnit, you're being impractical; it'll never work." (They thought I was too interested in theory and not enough in turning the cranks on lathes and mills; though we generally got along, we did have -- philosophical differences.) Scanning took a few seconds, after which I took a minute to note the pixel coordinates of the hole centers in a spreadsheet. Then I measured one edge of the part with the micrometer to get a pixel-to-inch scale, popped that number into the spreadsheet, and out came the x,y coordinates of all the holes in the part. When we CNCed the new plate with those hole locations, they all lined up with the part-to-be-mounted perfectly -- at which point they were pretty much forced to admit that maybe the kid knew what the hell he was doing!
I've thought since then that some software designed for the task (with edge-recognition algorithms, measurement features, etc) could turn consumer-grade scanners into decent reverse-engineering tools (for planar parts).
Doesn't sound like it's too complicated. (Score:3, Interesting)
The hardest part is just picking out the target from the photo. In most interior scenes, the target they're using would probably work pretty well (it's a white square with heavy black edges) although it seems like there are some backgrounds where locating it might be a problem. But there are, if I'm not mistaken, some OSS efforts to do things like automatic facial recognition, and that's a much more complex problem than picking a black-on-white box out. (Particularly if the center of the box is reflectorized, so that it's always 255/255/255 when a flash photo is taken.)
Once you've located the target, knowing it's actual size and how many pixels wide it is in the image, then you can let the user pick any two points elsewhere on the image (which must be in the same plane as the target, and basically perpendicular to the camera's film/sensor) and tell them how far the points are apart in reality. It's just multiplication at that point.
If you look at OSS image-processing software, there are applications around that do much more complex stuff than this: Hugin [sourceforge.net], and Panorama Tools (the latter are what really do the heavy lifting) come immediately to mind. Compared to joining and sewing a panorama, this kind of measurement seems pretty easy, unless I'm missing something critical.
If I was recommending features for a measurement product, I think the key would be not to limit it to a particular target. Sure, a few printable targets, similar to the one used in TFA's commercical product, would be good for measurement of rooms and houses, but it would also be nice to use smaller things that are typically used for scale in macro photographs. E.g., dollar bills, quarters, width of a pencil, etc. Those would be tougher to automatically recognize, and would probably require some prompting by the user in order to pick out, but would probably appeal to a wider variety of users. Who hasn't seen an eBay photo and wondered what the exact dimensions of something were?
ARToolkit (Score:2, Interesting)
ARToolkit's been used by the University of South Australia to create ARQuake [unisa.edu.au] which is a lot of fun to use with the actual wearable computer
I'm not sure if they used ARToolkit or something more in-house to make Tinmith [tinmith.net], that looks really sweet.
Similar software for decoration purposes (Score:2, Interesting)