CONFIGURATION AND SIMULATION TOOL FOR 360-DEGREE STEREO CAMERA RIG

Abstract

The demand for capturing outdoor and indoor scenes is rising with the digitalization trend in the construction industry. An efficient solution for capturing these environments is mobile mapping. Image-based systems with 360° panoramic coverage allow a rapid data acquisition and can be made user-friendly accessible when hosted in a cloud-based 3D geoinformation service. The design of such a 360° stereo camera system is challenging since multiple parameters like focal length, stereo base length and environmental restrictions such as narrow corridors are influencing each other. Therefore, this paper presents a toolset, which helps configuring and evaluating such a panorama stereo camera rig. The first tool is used to determine, from which distance on 360° stereo coverage depending on the parametrization of the rig is achieved. The second tool can be used to capture images with the parametrized camera rig in different virtual indoor and outdoor scenes. The last tool supports stitching the captured images together in respect of the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters from the configuration tool. This toolset radically simplifies the evaluation process of a 360° stereo camera configuration and decreases the number of physical MMS prototypes.