An Automatic Measurement Method for Absolute Depth of Objects in Two Monocular Images Based on SIFT Feature

It is one of very important and basic problem in compute vision field that recovering depth information of objects from two-dimensional images. In view of the shortcomings of existing methods of depth estimation, a novel approach based on SIFT (the Scale Invariant Feature Transform) is presented in this paper. The approach can estimate the depths of objects in two images which are captured by an un-calibrated ordinary monocular camera. In this approach, above all, the first image is captured. All of the camera parameters remain unchanged, and the second image is acquired after moving the camera a distance d along the optical axis. Then image segmentation and SIFT feature extraction are implemented on the two images separately, and objects in the images are matched. Lastly, an object depth can be computed by the lengths of a pair of straight line segments. In order to ensure that the best appropriate a pair of straight line segments are chose and reduce the computation, the theory of convex hull and the knowledge of triangle similarity are employed. The experimental results show our approach is effective and practical.