The development of image-based distance measurement system

In this paper, a novel image-based method of distance measurement is proposed. Traditionally, the parallax method is frequently used to measure the distance between the camera and the measured surface. But for diminishing the computational complexity and inaccuracy cause by image processing procedure, the proposed system only using two parallel laser beams project to the measured surface then analyze the information of a captured image to compute the distance. Furthermore, in order to improve the accuracy of the experiment, the proposed algorithm also provides a mechanism to make sure the results will not be influenced by the angle between the optical axis of the camera and measured surface. The experimental results showed the proposed method provided precise measuring results in several different distances.