Spatial data acquisition from motion video

Abstract

Geographic information systems are an important tool for the field of geocomputing. A key component of every system is the data—spatial data has traditionally been labour-intensive to collect, and hence expensive. This paper establishes a new method of acquiring spatial data from motion video. The proposed method is based upon the principles of photogrammetry, but allows position to be calculated with feature tracking rather than point correspondence. By doing so, it avoids many constraints imposed by previous solutions. The new method is demonstrated with linear and rotational motion.