Measure Anything with a Camera and Software

Kevin C. Tofel writes "Using a simple concept, iPhotoMEASURE software can measure any objects you can take a picture of. Include a printout of a 7.5- or 15-inch square in the photo and the software can measure any distance or object in the pic to within 99.5% accuracy. Although geared towards contractors, there's any number of consumer usage scenarios as well. Enough to justify a $99 price tag? Jury's still out on that."

Comments

Re:Not practical.

[Smidge204]

I dunno. I work as an engineer and I'm thinking something like this could be really useful.

No matter how many times you go out to a job site to measure and verify things, something always comes up that requires you to go back. For this reason, we take a lot of pictures in hopes that the camera will catch something we might not be looking for at the time.

I can't begin to count how many times I've counted bricks in those pictures to estimate distances. If I had software that could look at the image and provide measurements with 99.5% accuracy, that would be extremely useful. At $99 it would probably pay for itself after three or four uses just on time saved going back out to the site.
=Smidge=

tax on people who can't do math

[fermion]

When asked why math helps, this is the the sort of situation I point to. What this software does is nothing more than apply similarity. Researchers have been doing this for years by placing a rule in every photo so that, no matter how the photo is resized, the dimensions are always knows. Measure the line, measure the feature, divide the two, and multiply by the length of the line. In any case, more sophisticated software is available for free, like tracker at sourceforge.

But what really gets me is the claim in the advert, claims that hyperbolic if not outright lies. I can easily construct a photo in which a house appears to be the same dimensions of the squares. One more effective way to do what the software is proposing is to know the dimensions of a feature that is part of the object you wish to measure, and use similarity to approximate the dimensions of the smaller or larger object.

Waste of money!

[robkeeney]

All it does is count pixels. Take the picture with the known size block in it, then count how many pixels the block takes up: that's your dots per inch -- for objects the same distance away as the known size image. I read somewhere that the Japanese (I think) used to do this at musical instrument trade shows, by wearing a 1 cm square tie tack and taking photos of each other holding instruments. They could get the dimensions of the instrument from the photos that way, and make great cheap knock-offs.