Pedestrian Height Estimation and 3D Reconstruction Using Pixel-resolution Mapping Method Without Special Patterns

Extracting the three-dimensional (3D) information including location and height of a pedestrian is important for vision-based intelligent traffic monitoring systems. This paper tackles the relationship between pixels′ actual size and pixels′ spatial resolution through a new method named pixel-resolution mapping (P-RM). The proposed P-RM method derives the equations for pixels′ spatial resolutions (XY-direction) and object′s height (Z-direction) in the real world, while introducing new tilt angle and mounting height calibration methods that do not require special calibration patterns placed in the real world. Both controlled laboratory and actual world experiments were performed and reported. The tests on 3D mensuration using proposed P-RM method showed overall better than 98.7% accuracy in laboratory environments and better than 96% accuracy in real world pedestrian height estimations. The 3D reconstructed images for measured points were also determined with the proposed P-RM method which shows that the proposed method provides a general algorithm for 3D information extraction.