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Measuring and modelling sewer pipes from video

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Abstract

This article presents a system for the automatic measurement and modelling of sewer pipes. The system recovers the interior shape of a sewer pipe from a video sequence which is acquired by a fish-eye lens camera moving inside the pipe. The approach is based on tracking interest points across successive video frames and posing the general structure-from-motion problem. It is shown that the tracked points can be reliably reconstructed despite the forward motion of the camera. This is achieved by utilizing a fish-eye lens with a wide field of view. The standard techniques for robust estimation of the two- and three-view geometry are modified so that they can be used for calibrated fish-eye lens cameras with a field of view less than 180°. The tubular arrangement of the reconstructed points allows pipe shape estimation by surface fitting. Hence, a method for modelling such surfaces with a locally cylindrical model is proposed. The system is demonstrated with a real sewer video and an error analysis for the recovered structure is presented.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Machine Vision Group, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Juho Kannala, Sami S. Brandt & Janne Heikkilä

  2. Laboratory of Computational Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland

    Sami S. Brandt

Authors
  1. Juho Kannala
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  2. Sami S. Brandt
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  3. Janne Heikkilä
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Correspondence to Juho Kannala.

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Kannala, J., Brandt, S.S. & Heikkilä, J. Measuring and modelling sewer pipes from video. Machine Vision and Applications 19, 73–83 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-007-0083-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-007-0083-1

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