POTENTIALS OF IMAGE BASED ACTIVE RANGING TO CAPTURE DYNAMIC SCENES

Abstract. Obtaining a 3D description of man-made and natural environments is a basic task in Computer Vision and Remote Sensing. To this end, laser scanning is currently one of the dominating techniques to gather reliable 3D information. The scanning principle inherently needs a certain time interval to acquire the 3D point cloud. On the other hand, new active sensors provide the possibility of capturing range information by images with a single measurement. With this new technique image-based active ranging is possible which allows capturing dynamic scenes, e.g. like walking pedestrians in a yard or moving vehicles. Unfortunately most of these range imaging sensors have strong technical limitations and are not yet sufficient for airborne data acquisition. It can be seen from the recent development of highly specialized (far-)range imaging sensors – so called flash-light lasers – that most of the limitations could be alleviated soon, so that future systems will be equipped with improved image size and potentially expanded operating range. The presented work is a first step towards the development of methods capable for application of range images in outdoor environments. To this end, an experimental setup was set up for investigating these proposed possibilities. With the experimental setup a measurement campaign was carried out and first results will be presented within this paper.