Photogrammetric Applications of Immersive Video Cameras

The paper investigates immersive videography and its application in close-range photogrammetry. Immersive video involves the capture of a live-action scene that presents a 360° field of view. It is recorded simultaneously by multiple cameras or microlenses, where the principal point of each camera is offset from the rotating axis of the device. This issue causes problems when stitching together individual frames of video separated from particular cameras, however there are ways to overcome it and applying immersive cameras in photogrammetry provides a new potential. The paper presents two applications of immersive video in photogrammetry. At first, the creation of a low-cost mobile mapping system based on Ladybug®3 and GPS device is discussed. The amount of panoramas is much too high for photogrammetric purposes as the base line between spherical panoramas is around 1 metre. More than 92 000 panoramas were recorded in one Polish region of Czarny Dunajec and the measurements from panoramas enable the user to measure the area of outdoors (adverting structures) and billboards. A new law is being created in order to limit the number of illegal advertising structures in the Polish landscape and immersive video recorded in a short period of time is a candidate for economical and flexible measurements off-site. The second approach is a generation of 3d video-based reconstructions of heritage sites based on immersive video (structure from immersive video). A mobile camera mounted on a tripod dolly was used to record the interior scene and immersive video, separated into thousands of still panoramas, was converted from video into 3d objects using Agisoft Photoscan Professional. The findings from these experiments demonstrated that immersive photogrammetry seems to be a flexible and prompt method of 3d modelling and provides promising features for mobile mapping systems.