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:Expensive

[jackharrer]

It targeted towards contractors, who will buy it from company's money or take from their taxes.
No so expensive if you think about it in this way.

Unfortunately...

[avalys]

I thought this was some kind of cool new perspective-based algorithm or something, but it turns out you have to be able to get close enough to the object to stick a label of known dimensions on it. The software justs compares the size of the label with the size of the object you're measuring. I'm not paying $99 for that.

There are already a number of laser rangefinders with compasses built-in that can do the same thing using simple trig.

Re:Expensive

[hal2814]

If they're really targeting contractors, $99 is a bit too cheap. The perception will be that if there is a $1000 program out there that can do the same thing, it must be better than this little $99 program. Never underestimate a business' ability to blow money.

Damn cheap in my book.

[Shivetya]

My cousin does this manually, using pictures of job sites and items on known size, to estimate needs.

$99 is nothing. If it can save material purchased for a big job it will most likely pay for itself instantly, not counting all the time saved photographing and measuring that is now with manual processing afterward.

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=

Cost prohibitive?!?

[physicsboy500]

Honestly, I could see almost every contractor getting into this...

I think people need to realize that this will be it's major market as surveying costs run in the $20~30/hour range for a single trained surveyor... this is skilled work. If companies can instead send out untrained (or barely trained) individuals at $10-$15/hr with much less time spent in calculation and only a $100 sunk cost into the software there is no reason they wouldn't choose this method. Very good news for contractors, bad for surveyors.

The price is almost low enough for consumers with a need to calculate distances relatively regularly to purchase this software.

I doubt it

[oliverthered]

If I take a picture of an arch with something in the background of the arch there's no way it's going to be able to measure both the foreground and background distances without any knowledge of the distance the objects are away from the camera etc...
You'd have to stick known distance marks on everything in your picture.

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.

Never under-price.

[Kadin2048]

They should make a $1299 "Professional" version, quick. It'll be the exact same product as the $99 version, just in a different color, and with a printed, spiral-bound manual.

It's definitely possible to under-price your product if you're not careful. Actually, having a $1299 version might even help drive sales of the $99 version, because people would perceive the $99 version as a sort of 'deal,' as in "hey, for $99 I'm getting 60% of the features of the $1300 version! That's great! I'll take three."

Guess there's a lot of "trash."

[Kadin2048]

But since it is not 100% accurate, then its trash.

You do know that's impossible, right? I could use a laser interferometer, and determine the distance between two objects down to a fraction of a nanometer, and it would still not be "100% accurate."

Re:Guess there's a lot of "trash."

[djh101010]

Let me re-phrase:Since it is not 100% accurate [i]compared with what their current accuracy standards are.[/i]Regardless, this thing is a piece of crap.They don't [i]know[/i] their market...they only think they do.If they acctually asked a professional in any field they thought this would be useful, they'd have been laughed at.

Really. So you understand the difference between an estimate and the craftsman doing the actual work then, right? The estimator's job is to be close enough that they come out just about right. Overages, OR underages, are bad. Yet, it's an _estimate_. This is a tool to get reasonable accuracy (so it's claimed) for doing estimates. No finish carpenter worth employing would use these measurements as a cutlist, that's not what it's for. This is so they can say "OK, homeowner, that's 527 square feet of siding, 240 feet of soffit and facia, 220 feet of gutter, and 12 square of shingles, so your cost estimate for materials is blah". Obviously nobody is going to go and cut the siding to 17' 4-11/16" based on something like this.

Re:Guess there's a lot of "trash."

[tkw954]

My favourite quote from engineering school: "Measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with an axe"

I think that's the marketing dept.

[Kadin2048]

That link doesn't work (at least, not for me). I think it looks at the referer and won't let you deeplink to the image. You have to go through the blog to see it:
http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2007/02/how _to_measure_.html

Looking at that photo, I'm not buying that it can measure all those distances from a single photo. I think there is some advertising hyperbole going on here. I get that you could measure all those distances and dimensions, using multiple photos -- one each of every flat surface, moving the target each time so it's the same distance from the camera as the surface being measured -- but I don't think it would work from a single photo.

The only way you could measure everything from a single photo like that, would be if the camera was stereoscopic, or had some other form of depth perception. Otherwise, as you noticed, there's no way for it to know that the window that's closer to the camera is not really bigger than the garage door that's further away.