Cellular phones cameras technological development as a hand-held electronic instrument with almost everybody nowadays will open the door to their potential usage as viable mensuration instruments. These extracted measurements would have the advantages of being inexpensive and portable ones.
As a hand-held tool and wide availability, cellular phones equipped with digital cameras is anticipated to give them the potential of in-situ real-time measurements as well as the usage for documentation purposes. However, the accuracy potential of the extracted measurements affected by the small image domain, small field of view, and camera configuration. Further, the usage of high resolution cellular phones cameras is anticipated to overcome these challenges.
The potential of cellular phones’ cameras in metrology using normal-based setup was investigated. In this research work, the captured images were used to extract some of traffic monitoring parameters as well as road inventory, vehicle classification and intersections. Cellular phones cameras’ resolutions that ranged from 2 to 12 Megapixels were investigated in this domain despite their fixed focus lenses and smaller sensors that would limit their performance in poor lighting.
Findings of research show that the potential of using high-resolution cellular phones in traffic parameters mapping, vehicle classification and road geometric features is promising. In fact, increasing the phone’s camera resolution up to 12 Megapixels would consistently give high potential computational accuracy results for all studied parameters. Road intersection shows measurements of average errors ranging between 13% and 21% for camera resolution ranging between 8.0 Mega Pixels to 0.3 Mega Pixels. Further, speed profile could easily be generated with high accuracy potential.
A CAD drawing of the mapped intersection scene was also generated. However, the computational accuracy potential degraded rapidly when changing camera resolution in case of vehicle classification study due to shutter speed problem and mapping vehicles while in motion.
The promising conclusions of this technology is anticipated to open the door -for the first time usage- of cellular phones in the domain of transportation engineering computing in order to extract viable and accurate traffic and geometrical parameters. Thus, this method of gauging and computation would also be extended in order to produce surface measurements for any civil engineering application in the domains of transportation, structural, geotechnical and environmental engineering in a practical and new trend technology. It is anticipated that with the technology booming of new cellular phones production of higher resolution, mensuration accuracy would reach close values to real dimensions.
معالي الأستاذ الدكتور محمد طالب عبيدات | HE PROF. Moh’d Taleb Obaidat | 7455