Axial stereo-photogrammetry for 360 degrees measurement on tubular samples

This work presents a stereo-photogrammetry (SP) based procedure to perform whole-body measurements on tubular samples. Such a system is designed for future applications to the study of vascular wall mechanics. The use of a concave conical mirror surrounding the specimen makes it possible to capture the reflected 360 degrees surface with a single snapshot moving neither cameras nor object. Then, according to 3-D computer vision principles, a stereo camera system retrieves control points depth information from image-pairs of the investigated Surface. An axial-SP arrangement is selected since is more suitable for this specific application than the more popular lateral-stereo model. In this paper, particular emphasis is given to a formulation taking into account even small camera misalignments. A calibration process based on optimization concepts is used together with a feature-based matching algorithm to efficiently find correspondence between highly distorted images reflected by the conical mirror. Both theoretical and experimental analyses on calibrated samples demonstrated feasibility and accuracy of the proposed procedure. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.