A Novel Distance Measurement Method Using a Monocular Vision System

With the development of machine vision technology, target distance measurement is paid more and more attention. The commonly used stereo-vision and related technologies are based on the matching of corresponding points, which may affect the accuracy and efficiency of computation. To overcome this drawbacic of stereo-vision technology, this paper proposes a novel distance measurement method. This method uses the principle of pinhole imaging and the properties of camera imaging to extract depth information and realize distance measurement. The method is divided into three stages. The first stage conducts camera calibration. Then, the distance in the optical axis direction is modeled using image processing. Finally, according to the relationship between the central point and feature point in the image, the distance measurement is completed. At the end of this paper, an experiment is carried out to validate the proposed distance measurement method. During the experiment, the average measurement error is 0.17%, which proves the feasibility of the proposed method.